The Barracks Thief is a short novel that tells the life story of a paratrooper named Philip Bishop. It begins with the story of his father, who abandoned him, his brother, and his mother to go live with another woman. His father is described as the type of man who is never content and always moves around to new places, jobs, and women. This restlessness severely impacts the lives of his family members; his sons especially take it hard, with Philip developing a hatred for his father and Keith turning down the wrong path with substance abuse in his grief.
Philip's family isn't the only one that experiences tragedy in this novel. Hubbard, one of the men with whom Philip guards the ammo dump on that crucial Fourth of July, has two good friends from back home, Vogel and Kirk, and he receives a message saying that they were both killed, along with their dates, in a car crash. Hubbard becomes despondent, although he takes his grief better than either Philip or Keith, but eventually he deserts the army, which definitely isn't the place for him. In one sense, this is a novel about coping with tragedy, and how not to cope with tragedy. Every character in this book undergoes some kind of hardship, and few of them respond well. In the end, however, they all end up alright; Lewis and Hubbard are presumably doing well, and Keith turns himself around and gets a steady job. Philip himself gets married and settles down, a surprising ending for such a strange, unemotional man. Perhaps the message of the novel is an exhortation to persevere in the face of tragedy because everything will work out, one way or another.
This is a particularly personal novel for Tobias Wolff, the author. His own parents separated when he was young, so the separation of Philip's parents has a heartbreakingly authentic feel. Philip's life mirrors his own in several other ways as well: Wolff served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, and he also trained as a paratrooper, just like Philip. These personal touches certainly add a flavor of authenticity to the book, perhaps one of the reasons it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 1985. Regardless, it's a powerful picture of life as an army recruit and a representation of the tragedy that's inevitable in life.
