Summary of You Know When the Men are Gone

"Fallon writes with both grit and grace: her depiction of military life is enlivened by telling details, from the early morning sound of boots stomping down the stairs to the large sign that tallies automobile fatalities of troops returned from Iraq. Significant both as war stories and love stories, this collection certifies Fallon as an indisputable talent." -- Publishers Weekly

Debut author Siobhan Fallon electrifyingly evokes a world largely passed by in literature and unfamiliar to most Americans in her arresting collection of interconnected short stories, You Know When the Men are Gone. Fallon's tales of life on a contemporary American military base -- at once lyrical, gritty, and deeply moving -- were inspired by her own experiences as an army wife living at Fort Hood, Texas, while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty. Her collection has already been showered with advance praise, included in Publisher Weekly's Spring 2011 First Fiction round-up of ten promising fiction debuts, and featured on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." Publishers Weekly also gave the book a starred review, noting that Fallon writes "with both grit and grace" and proclaiming "this collection certifies Fallon as an indisputable talent." The Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District is delighted to bestow another honor on the book: the 2011 One Book Two Villages title.

With fidelity, compassion, and stunning honesty, Fallon's eight loosely linked stories take readers inside the homes, marriages, and families of that small segment of our society that deals daily with the emotional consequences of our ongoing wars. As in civilian life, there are extramarital affairs, health crises, teenage angst, financial stresses, and scrapes with the law, but all are heightened and distorted by the knowledge that the person you depend on most in the world is 5,000 miles from home and in harm's way.

In the title story, "Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life." And an exotically beautiful, Serbian-born soldier's wife, who has escaped one war and found herself caught in the wake of another, is driven to a heartrending act of desperation when she can't take the waiting anymore. In "Camp Liberty," an investment-banker-turned-soldier dreams obsessively of the ordinary pleasures of home, but falls into a problematic, irresistible friendship with an Iraqi female interpreter, and wonders whether his years in the Army would be "the most vivid, the most startlingly real, of his entire life."

In "Remission," an army wife being treated for breast cancer is shaken to the core when her teenage daughter and young son go missing. Oddly, the fact that she has a husband at home, on administrative duty, "made her different from everyone else in a way that even the cancer did not." "Inside the Break" tells of a marriage threatened by an email disclosure of infidelity during a soldier's tour of duty in Baghdad, but rescued by a couple's realization of how lucky they are to be together, and intact. In counterpoint, "The Last Stand" chronicles the uneasy reunion in a hotel room between a wounded twenty-one-year old soldier and his wife, a college student homesick for her family and friends in the Midwest. Fallon writes, "The light of the television flashed over both of them in their separate beds, unheeded like a lightning storm."

In "Leave," perhaps the collection's most chilling story, an intelligence officer who fears that his wife is unfaithful secretly breaks into his own home and occupies the basement for days, keeping silent watch. As he has learned in his interrogations of informers and suspects in Iraq, "it was difficult to determine if someone was one-hundred-percent guilty, but nearly impossible to find someone one-hundred-percent innocent."

"You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming" takes its title from a similar sign above the gate at Fort Hood. In it, the mother of a nursing infant receives a disturbing early-morning call from her husband, an up-and-coming officer recently returned from Iraq, asking her to pick him up after a night in jail. Brought to the brink of separation from him by a hurtful act, she considers whether "this was the sum of a marriage: wordless recriminations or reconciliations, every breath either striving against or toward the other person, each second a decision to exert or abdicate the self."

Finally, in "Gold Star," a newly widowed twenty-six-year-old reluctantly pulls into a special parking space at the PX reserved for "Gold Star Families," where "the pity rising from the asphalt singed hotter than any Texas sun." This is why she generally avoids the Gold Star spot, "with its imagery of schoolchildren receiving A's and stickers for a job well done." But the wounded soldier coming over today is someone she wants to meet – the man whose life her husband saved as he died. She knows "this man was not her husband, that her husband was never coming back, but for now she was as close to him as she could get and she would not let him go."

With America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan rapidly approaching the ten-year mark, Fallon reveals much that we should know about the hidden costs of these conflicts. She writes in an Author's Note: "While You Know When the Men are Gone is a work of fiction, I hope that I was able to reflect the spectrum of the current army-family experience. There are so many more stories that I wished I had written: there are so many spouses who continue to inspire me with their constant support of their soldiers. They are independent, patient, fearless, remarkable men and women, and I am grateful to be a part of their community."

Ultimately, however, Fallon's stories grip us not because of the lessons they teach, but because of her astonishing skill as a storyteller in making indelibly real and utterly compelling -- from the unhinged to the painfully mundane -- the strange world of a military base when the men have left, and the even stranger world when they suddenly return.