The two main characters of In Country are Sam Hughes, a seventeen-year-old girl from Hopewell, Kentucky, and her uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam War veteran. Emmett becomes a surrogate parent for Sam because her father died in Vietnam before her birth and her mother has remarried and established a new family miles away in Lexington. Sam and Emmett live together in a decrepit house and form another of Mason’s unconventional modern families.
With these two main characters Mason combines the themes of initiation and recovery. In the course of the summer, Sam comes of age, and Emmett simultaneously attempts to resolve the residual problems from his military service in Vietnam.
Sam moves toward maturity by examining the past—primarily the war that took the father she never knew. The search for a father is a common motif in initiation stories since knowing one’s heritage may help to define one’s sense of self. Sam tries to clarify her identity by reading old letters and journal entries written by her father, by briefly dating a Vietnam War veteran, and by staging a mock military exercise at a nearby swamp that she thinks may display topography much like that of Vietnam.
Emmett attempts to fix his battered psyche by using construction or reconstruction techniques similar to those in other Mason stories such as “Shiloh” and “The Rookers.” He repairs defects in physical objects, such as toasters and hair dryers, in hopes that such actions will help him to fix internal...
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