Just as he did in The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (America Fantastica) explores in Clarity the shattering shrapnel that trauma scatters in all directions. Ruby Stjern appears in Tom Barrie's life when she needs help: at 17, she's pregnant and wants to place the baby for adoption. Tom, 33, is the person she goes to; he leads the congregation at Damascus Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minn. Each has seen their version of war: Tom in Bagram, Afghanistan, Ruby in her upbringing. The novel tracks a tortured, years-long relationship between them, in which she's always running and he's trying to find her, but she is always three steps ahead.
Grace, Tom's wife of seven years, is the first to name the seemingly split personalities Ruby inhabits--Ruby, Roberta, Bobby--with the narrative moving among Bobby's first-person narrative, Tom's third-person perspective, and Grace's first-person narrative as Ruby evolves toward wellness. Tom loves Grace "the way he hoped someday to love God." He has a complicated relationship with God, and his faith manifests more as doubt than hope. On the night Grace is scheduled to return from Denmark, where she's doing research for a book on Hans Christian Andersen, Tom comes home to find Ruby sleeping in the bed he shares with Grace. An unusual living arrangement commences, with Ruby living upstairs in Grace and Tom's house.
Calamity follows Ruby wherever she goes: Tom rents out his deceased father's house, and it burns down; the doctor present at the delivery of Ruby's baby mysteriously dies by suicide; Ruby's parents died in what was deemed a "murder-suicide." O'Brien slowly unwinds what propels Ruby and how she acts as a catalyst to keep Tom and Grace's marriage together. But nothing for Tom, Ruby, or Grace is simple. Through them, O'Brien asks if there is such a thing as truth: "You were good to me," Ruby tells Tom and Grace. "But watch out for clarity. People who know all the answers are fucking fools."
O'Brien beautifully and convincingly depicts humans who must face their darkness or forever carry and be ruled by it. Outward geography, marital status, and occupations all change, but people remain weighted down until they confront it and, unburdened, become available to life and love. O'Brien offers no easy answers but gives readers deep insights into what it means to be human, to love deeply, and to care for others. --Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Talker: In Tim O'Brien's moving novel, a pregnant teen asks a minister to help her place her baby for adoption, and a friendship develops that profoundly changes them both.