Odyssey of a Hero

John Benton returns to small-town Idaho in 1919 with three nations' decorations and a heroine's welcome: seven speeches, twelve bands, two truckloads of flowers. The town wants a hero. They want stories of glory and single-handed slaughter, charges across no-man's-land. They want the romantic war they've built in their imaginations. But John can't perform. His war was mud and shell shock and the things he did to survive that weren't heroic at all. When he stays silent, when he can't lie about what he saw and did, the town that crowned him begins to drift. His own mother seems to prefer the invented hero to the quiet, haunted man sitting in their parlor. Fisher wrote this in the late 1930s, when America was already forgetting the Somme to build toward the next great adventure. What he captured was the particular cruelty of patriotic gratitude: the demand that veterans perform their trauma for civilian comfort. It's a novel about what happens when truth is less welcome than myth, and the loneliness of a man who can't sell the lie everyone needs him to tell.