Summary
The Barracks Thief is a short novel, closer to a long story, about three young paratroopers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, waiting for orders to Vietnam. It opens not in the army but in a family: Guy Bishop walks out on his wife and two sons, Philip and Keith. Philip turns his hurt into hatred of his father, and after high school he enlists and joins the 82nd Airborne Division.
At Fort Bragg, on the Fourth of July, Philip and two other new men, Lewis and Hubbard, are put on guard at an ammunition dump in the woods while a forest fire burns nearby. When the local police arrive to take them out of danger, Lewis levels his rifle at them, Hubbard finally sides with him, Philip stays neutral, and the rescuers retreat. The fire dies out and nothing, after all, has happened, but the day has bound the three together. Then money starts disappearing from the barracks. Wallets vanish, and Hubbard is attacked and robbed. The thief is Lewis, lonely and desperate, and when he is caught the men of the barracks give him a beating; Hubbard refuses to take part, and Philip watches. Years later Philip, now settled into an ordinary, comfortable life, looks back: Lewis got a dishonorable discharge, Hubbard deserted, and Philip remembers the day at the dump.
Wolff moves between an overview of the Bishop family, Philip's first person memory and a present tense section inside Lewis's head, and the shifts are smooth enough that you barely notice them. The book can be read in an evening, but it is dense with small moral failures. It suits readers who know Wolff's stories or This Boy's Life, and anyone interested in how young men become soldiers, or fail to.
Historical Context & Significance
The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1985. The Ecco Press had published it in 1984, between Wolff's first story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), and his memoir This Boy's Life (1989). The finalists were Harriet Doerr's Stones for Ibarra, Donald Hays's The Dixie Association, David Leavitt's Family Dancing and James Purdy's On Glory's Courses. In the New York Times, Walter Kendrick wrote that in less skillful hands its shifting points of view "might have been merely tricky, but Mr. Wolff makes it work to his advantage."
Wolff knew the army from the inside. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1945, he served from 1964 to 1968, trained for Special Forces and went to Vietnam as an adviser, experience he later wrote about in his memoir In Pharaoh's Army (1994). In September 2015 President Obama presented Wolff with the 2014 National Medal of Arts. A film adaptation, written by Jonathan Keasey and the playwright Tyler Rivenbark, was announced in 2024.
Where to get it
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