The fast-paced, darkly funny novel of the men on the home front during the Vietnam War—with an infectious spirit akin to Kurt Vonnegut’s finest storytelling
This furious, slapstick tale has been praised by the New York Times as one of the “best and brightest” novels about the Vietnam War. We follow the travails of Harvey Brank and his fellow employees, all undrafted malcontents working in a spectacularly small-minded, almost Kafkaesque engineering company. Assigned to build a fighter plane and drawn into office intrigues, Brank faces impossible demands. His wife, despairing of his patchy employment history and restlessness, hopes against hope that Brank won’t get himself fired this time. But what do you do when everything conspires against your vision of a decent, peaceable life? Easy and Hard Ways Out is a blunt, freewheeling look at the men who stay home during wartime—a story about the everyday, with a timeless moral at its heart.