Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone [Book Reviews]

An hour and a half down the road from Austin, and occupying 340 square miles of semi-arid Central Texas terrain, sits one of the world's largest military installations - Fort Hood. Some 50,000 soldiers work on post, making it the largest single-site employer in Texas. As of 2006, 85% of those troops had served at least one tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Published early this year, Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone details what life is like for the families left behind when those soldiers deploy [note: the book was part of the Mayor's 2011 book club]. The life of a military spouse, and specifically one at Fort Hood, is a life Fallon knows well. The New York native is married to an Army major who has served three tours of duty, two of them out of Fort Hood between 2006 and 2009.

The eight short stories that make up You Know When the Men Are Gone are linked to one another by more than just Fort Hood; several characters appear in more than one piece, like a yellow ribbon tying the stories together. At the start, Fallon had us worried that, as an officer's wife, she would be in over her head when it came to bringing the enlisted soldiers' stories to life without condescension. Happily, that was not the case. Each of Fallon's characters defies stereotype and contributes to the overall portrait of Army life. Great empathy combined with the wisdom of experience allows Fallon to unearth the truth in the men and women who inhabit the pages of her fiction.

Fallon pulls off what could easily have become melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer by writing with a clean, spare style free of unneeded flourishes. Also to her credit, Fallon avoids any easy answers, preferring instead to leave many of her stories unresolved. This ambiguity can of course be frustrating to readers used to having all plot lines neatly sewn up, but ultimately it adds to the effectiveness of the stories by requiring the reader to meet Fallon halfway and allowing the questions left unanswered to linger.

One of the book's standout stories is "Leave," which paints an eerie picture of just what a combination of war, separation, and paranoia can do to a man and to his family. Convinced his wife has been cheating while he was deployed, Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash breaks into his own home and uses his investigative skills, honed in the Army, to run surveillance on her. The horrors he has seen while deployed find a mirror in the ghastly Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales favored by his young daughter over their Disney counterparts. "Gold Star," the book's closing piece, is a focused and poignant reminder of what many have lost and the strange comforts which only a stranger can provide. Overall, the book is a quick read, but one whose stories will haunt you for days and weeks to come.

Sibohan Fallon: [website]