Book Review:
OFF TRACK Jim McGarrah
Reviewed in the
Stars and Stripes, October 2, 2015
by
Susan McCarty
Let the full title of Jim McGarrah’s latest memoir,
Off Track or How I Dropped Out of College and Came to be a Horse Trainer in the 1970s While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs, be your guide to McGarrah’s loquacious, funny narrative and narrator. Let it also locate the reader in the epicenter of Baby Boomer counterculture while promptly letting you know that this story isn’t going to be that story.
McGarrah, a Marine and a Vietnam War veteran, is no stranger to counterculture, or memoir for that matter.
Off Track is the third memoir for McGarrah, which takes up where
A Temporary Sort of Peace (his Vietnam combat memoir) and
End of an Era (his counterculture memoir) leave off.
Part war memoir, part bildungsroman, part American folk-tale, part historical lament,
Off Track tells the story of a young McGarrah, returned home from war, injured, angry, and rudderless. In Chapter 2, “The Road to Angst,” we get a glimpse of McGarrah’s youthful attempts to answer his existential crisis--a wild-hair road trip to Mexico. Though the Mexico trip reads romantic, we understand that it stands in as a kind of shorthand for what feels to McGarrah like a ceaseless alienation-and-return leftover from his time in combat in the DMZ. McGarrah writes:
"The emptiness in my bowels became a metaphor for the emptiness in my soul upon our return…Forced by a strange desire for normalcy after the war and a disastrous four years wandering the now failed counter-culture utopia, I returned to my hometown and attempted a year working at the post office and being married. Both failed miserably."
The outsider status conferred on veterans when they return home from war is well-tread territory, but McGarrah’s memoir is a redemption tale: When they make you an outsider, become a gypsy.
The decade he spent as a groom and horse trainer makes up the bulk of this book, though the chapters are only roughly chronological—McGarrah gives himself plenty of room here to play around, to move backwards and forward in time at will, giving the reader the experience of a “present rummaged through” by the past and of a life lived “in two places at once.” Here, McGarrah is speaking of his PTSD. The two places are the complimentary worlds of his time in combat and his time in the horse world, but as I read
Off Track, I got a strong sense of many pasts and presents at play in this impressionistic work: McGarrah’s relationship with his father and his own conflicting masculinities as a young man, an obsession with the culture of the track, his marital struggles and the encroaching corporatization of the sport of horse racing.
In one chapter entitled “The Artist,” McGarrah ruminates upon a talented mechanic who worked for his father, a painter in his own right, and the man’s warning that people should not “live in one life while they belong in another.” This becomes a kind of artist’s statement to McGarrah, a call to do well what one is able to do, but it is also a description of writing, and reading a book. And
Off Track—with its interesting slippages in time and echoes of PTSD recurring (as PTSD does) in unexpected places—becomes a kind of meditation on what happens to a man when he must live both lives at once out of necessity, since, as McGarrah notes, “A combat veteran lives in two worlds simultaneously, the present and the past.”
And the racetrack proves to be a nice analog for combat: The grueling work, the comradery and hierarchy of the track, and the darkness of many of its denizens, makes it a space for McGarrah to work out his place in the world post-Vietnam through fascinating slice-of-life descriptions of track-and-horse work and folksy tale-telling. The reader gets a round, full feel for the allure of the life and its quirks.
When McGarrah recounts shoeing a two-year-old colt, he writes, “Everything living created its own comfort zone.” For McGarrah’s young narrator, a man without comfort, the track becomes this zone, as do the ways of the track. There is something about the oral tradition (I can see McGarrah’s narrator lighting up with raunchy glee at this expression) of storytelling that circulates wherever men labor—this tradition takes up residence in McGarrah’s prose, which modulates between psychological realism, lyric, and tale. This blend of genre, this mustering of all forces to tell the story, may be one of the most rewarding aspects of
Off Track—the books feels multilayered and multivalent, which makes sense given that McGarrah is also a novelist and an award-winning poet. Jobs make for great material, and the added depth of McGarrah’s backstory and struggles make Off Track a rewarding memoir.
Susan McCarty teaches creative writing and literature at Salisbury University in Maryland. Her short story collection "Anatomies" was published in June.
