Oh, Johnny by Jim Lehrer (Review)

By Jim Lehrer

Random House. 219 pp. $25

Reviewed by Colman McCarthy

In his 19th novel in a run going back to the mid-1960’s, PUBLIC TELEVISION NEWS HOST Jim Lehrer presents Johnny Wrigley, a baseball-loving WESTERN MARYLAND country boy HEADING off in April 1944 to kill Japanese people in World War II. On a troop train rolling cross country to California, THE 18-YEAR-OLD Johnny SAVORS “a kind of happy excitement” AT THE THOUGHT OF WHAT LOOMS AHEAD. He is “all ready and eager to do whatever it took to win the war against an enemy of evil slant-eyed monsters.”

HE WOULD GET his turn as a Marine flamethrower IN PELELIU AND Okinawa. IN ONE BATTLE HE OBEYS orders to “burn the little bastards” hiding in a cave. They were little all right, and their eyes were correctly Oriental, but they weren’t monsters. They were children, toddlers fleeing the cave with their mothers, all of them burning, screaming and dying. For that, Private Wrigley would get a Silver Star.

IN THE OPENING PAGES OF THIS SLIM AND SLIGHT NOVEL Johnny’s troop train stops in Wichita for a half-hour rest stop. It’s here that Lehrer, unlike the train, goes off the tracks. Straining credulity, he creates a scene in which the virginal backwoods boy has sex with an equally chaste 17-year-old on hand with other girls to pass out apples and cigarettes to the disembarked Marines. Johnny spots the girl in a crowd. INSTANT- ANEOUSLY smitten, and with the train soon to pull out, he takes her to a station backroom for a quickie--on a cot that just happens, miraculously, to be there. With first-timer Wrigley fumbling, the girl--an Amish-type religious lass NAMED BETSY--prayerfully mumbles, “Forgive me, Father, for the mortal sin that is in my most evil heart and soul at this very moment…” The boy hitches his pants and, Semper Fi, scoots for the departing train. FICTION ISN’T TRUE BUT IT SHOULD BE BELIEVABLE. LEHRER’S SEX SCENE ISN’T.

For the rest of the novel Johnny pines for Betsy. After the war, he does find her—IMPLAUSABLY so by spotting her in the left field bleachers while he’s playing a semi-pro baseball game in Wichita. NOTHING COMES OF THE REUNION. BETSY, NOW MARRIED TO A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR, TELLS JOHNNY “TO ASK FOR FORGIVENESS” (p. 194) FOR THE KILLING HE HAD DONE AS A MARINE.

The fluff and weightlessness of the clichéd story line--boy meets girl, boy goes to war, bullet-dodging and lovesick boy yearns for girl--is matched by Lehrer’s Kansas-flat language. Not a memorable metaphor or simile appears, unless you think describing a troop ship as a “floating hellhole in rough seas” (p. 41) or a girl AS HAVING “a chocolate éclair smile on her face” soars to the literary heights.

Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace.

9p. rise to the literary heights.