When we’re introduced to Silk, he is a 71-year-old retired college dean living in the Berkshires. After a contentious resignation from his position at Athena College and the sudden death of his wife from a stroke, Silk decides to tell his life story, writes it all down, but turns to his neighbor, Nathan Zuckerman, an established writer, to rewrite it for him.
Silk confides to Zuckerman that he has been unexpectedly revitalised by ecstatic sex with Faunia Farley, a local woman half his age. And Roth delivers a passage that is an enthusiastic endorsement of a drug whose generic name, sildenafil citrate, is far better known by its brand name Viagra:
I am a seventy-one-year-old man with a thirty-four-year-old mistress; I'm taking Viagra, Nathan. There's La Belle Dame sans Merci. I owe all of this turbulence and happiness to Viagra. Without Viagra none of this would be happening. Without Viagra I would have a picture of the world appropriate to my age and wholly different aims. Without Viagra I would have the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly. I would not be doing something that makes no sense. I would not be doing something unseemly, rash, ill considered, and potentially disastrous for all involved. Without Viagra, I could continue, in my declining years, to develop the broad impersonal perspective of an experienced and educated honorably discharged man who has long ago given up the sensual enjoyment of life. I could continue to draw profound philosophical conclusions and have a steadying moral influence on the young, instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication. Thanks to Viagra I've come to understand Zeus's amorous transformations.
That's what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus.
But Faunia carries a history around with her, everything from sexual abuse by a step-father to physical abuse by an ex-husband named Les Farley. This ex-husband is sometimes in jail for his violent attacks on Faunia and sometimes in rehab for his alcoholism. What neither place addresses or treats Farley for is what is clinically known as PTSD. Farley is a veteran of two tours in Vietnam, and, though he survived without a scratch, his mental state is deeply damaged. While it didn’t require exceptional insight for Philip Roth to imagine what lasting effect the experience of war’s savageries must have had on an average young man, his expression of his mental state is a tour de force:
The encounter with Farley. The encounter that night with Farley, the confrontation with a dairy farmer who had not meant to fail but did, a road crew employee who gave his all to the town no matter how lowly and degrading the task assigned him, a loyal American who'd served his country with not one tour but two, who'd gone back a second time to finish the goddamn job. Re-upped and went back because when he comes home the first time everybody says that he isn't the same person and that they don't recognize him, and he sees that it's true: they're all afraid of him. He comes home to them from jungle warfare and not only is he not appreciated but he is feared, so he might as well go back. He wasn't expecting the hero treatment, but everybody looking at him like that? So he goes back for the second tour, and this time he is geared up.
Pissed off. Pumped up. A very aggressive warrior. The first time he wasn't all that gung ho. The first time he was easygoing Les, who didn't know what it meant to feel hopeless. The first time he was the boy from the Berkshires who put a lot of trust in people and had no idea how cheap life could be, didn't know what medication was, didn't feel inferior to anyone, happy-go-lucky Les, no threat to society, tons of friends, fast cars, all that stuff. The first time he'd cut off ears because he was there and it was being done, but that was it.
He wasn't one of those who once they were in all that lawlessness couldn't wait to get going, the ones who weren't too well put together or were pretty aggressive to start off with and only needed the slightest opportunity to go ape-shit. One guy in his unit, guy they called Big Man, he wasn't there one or two days when he'd slashed some pregnant woman's belly open. Farley was himself only beginning to get good at it at the end of his first tour. But the second time, in this unit where there are a lot of other guys who'd also come back and who hadn't come back just to kill time or to make a couple extra bucks, this second time, in with these guys who are always looking to be put out in front, ape-shit guys who recognize the horror but know it is the very best moment of their lives, he is ape-shit too. In a firefight, running from danger, blasting with guns, you can't not be frightened, but you can go berserk and get the rush, and so the second time he goes berserk. The second time he fucking wreaks havoc. Living right out there on the edge, full throttle, the excitement and the fear, and there's nothing in civilian life that can match it. Door gunning. They're losing helicopters and they need door gunners. They ask at some point for door gunners and he jumps at it, he volunteers. Up there above the action, and everything looks small from above, and he just guns down huge.
Whatever moves. Death and destruction, that is what door gunning is all about. With the added attraction that you don't have to be down in the jungle the whole time. But then he comes home and it's not better than the first time, it's worse. Not like the guys in World War II: they had the ship, they got to relax, someone took care of them, asked them how they were. There's no transition. One day he's door gunning in Vietnam, seeing choppers explode, in midair seeing his buddies explode, down so low he smells skin cooking, hears the cries, sees whole villages going up in flames, and the next day he's back in the Berkshires. And now he really doesn't belong, and, besides, he's got fears now about things going over his head. He doesn't want to be around other people, he can't laugh or joke, he feels that he is no longer a part of their world, that he has seen and done things so outside what these people know about that he cannot connect to them and they cannot connect to him. They told him he could go home? How could he go home? He doesn't have a helicopter at home. He stays by himself and he drinks, and when he tries the VA they tell him he is just there to get the money while he knows he is there to get the help. Early on, he tried to get government help and all they gave him was some sleeping pills, so fuck the government. Treated him like garbage. You're young, they told him, you'll get over it. So he tries to get over it. Can't deal with the government, so he'll have to do it on his own. Only it isn't easy after two tours to come back and get settled all on his own. He's not calm. He's agitated. He's restless. He's drinking. It doesn't take much to put him into a rage. There are these things going over his head. Still he tries: eventually gets the wife, the home, the kids, the farm. He wants to be alone, but she wants to settle down and farm with him, so he tries to want to settle down too. Stuff he remembers easygoing Les wanting ten, fifteen years back, before Vietnam, he tries to want again. The trouble is, he can't really feel for these folks.
He's sitting in the kitchen and he's eating with them and there's nothing. No way he can go from that to this. Yet still he tries.
It isn’t so much the extent of the military’s brutalization of Farley as it was their failure to deprogram the trained killer, of transporting him from the systematic mind-fucking of combat straight back to the quiet Berkshire streets, to conscientious, live-and-let-live civilization and the expectation that he would simply have to put all that killing behind him without any help. Too many war movies are fascinated by battles but almost none of them show us the inability of some soldiers to readjust to their former lives and retrace to their former selves. And the fact that the Vietnam war was lost and that Americans made no effort to understand why and chose to turn its back on the war and its hundreds of thousands of veterans inevitably created monsters like Les Farley.
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