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Title: A Hard and Heavy Thing

Author: Matthew J. Hefti

Narrator: Matthew J. Hefti

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-14-16

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Contemplating suicide after nearly a decade at war, Levi sits down to write a note to his best friend Nick, explaining why things have to come to this inevitable end. Years earlier, Levi - a sergeant in the army - made a tragic choice that led his team into ambush, leaving three soldiers dead and two badly injured. During the attack, Levi risked death to save a badly burned and disfigured Nick. His actions won him the Silver Star for gallantry, but nothing could alleviate the guilt he carried after that fateful day. He may have saved Nick in Iraq, but when Levi returns home and spirals out of control, it is Nick's turn to play the savior, urging Levi to write. Levi begins to type as a way of bidding farewell, but what remains when he is finished is not a suicide note. It's a love song, a novel in which the beginning is the story's end, the story's end is the real beginning of Levi's life, and the future is as mutable as words on a page.

Members Reviews:

Hard and Heavy Questions

Sometimes, as a kid, I asked my dad for advice. Should I pick path A or B?

He usually said this cryptic line: âLife is full of choices.â

I used to think, What the hell does that mean? Thanks a lot, old man.

Now I realize it was a gift. He forced me to focus on the question, not the answer. A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti is like that. His book raises tough questions from the point of view of the three main characters: Levi, Nick, and Eris. Once you understand how the narration jumps back and forth in time, all you care about is the three characters. You feel the difficulty these young people have reintegrating into ânormal lifeâ after their turn at the Forever Wars.

Two parts of the book struck me. The book hinges on a combat scenario that involves Levi and Nick. Levi reaches a certain mental state after that fight:

He slept little and ate less, but he soldiered on. In the meantime, he allowed himself no respite from the work of keeping his squad alive. No longer did he think of himself. No longer did he allow his ego or romanticism or grand ideas to keep him from performing in the way he knew he should. He stopped thinking about the merits of the war. If war was bad, it didnât change his mission to keep his brothers alive. If war was good, it was only because it taught you how to survive; it taught you how to endure; it taught you how to wait; it taught you how to abide.

Later in the book, Nick, drunk and frustrated with his friend yells this at Levi:

You canât change anything, Levi. I canât change anything. The past is done. Itâs over.

I read Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes last year. Like its namesake mountain, itâs a towering novel that takes place in Vietnam. The two passages with Levi and Nick are about how the character deals with the horror of their circumstances and the merciless way that the arrow of time only goes in one direction. Heftiâs characters reminded me of one paragraph that Marlantes wrote in Matterhorn when the protagonist Mellas deals with the same topics:

He hid behind a blasted stump and he tried to think about meaning. He knew that there could be no meaning to someone who was dead. Meaning came out of living. Meaning could come only from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered. He saw that he alone could make Hawkeâs death meaningful by choosing what Hawk had chosen, the company.