Book Review: Skin It Back by Alexander Lowell

By Simon Demetriou

The experience and byproducts of disillusionment have long been fruitful subjects for literature, and in Alexander Lowell’s new book, he presents a figure caught in two states that are particularly liable to lead to disillusionment: the transition from childhood to adulthood; and the military.

The book calls itself an ‘unauthorised autobiography’, so while Alexander Lowell is not the author’s real name, we are left in some doubt as to how far to take the novel as autobiographical. Nevertheless, in Skin It Back, an Alexander Lowell narrates episodes of his life from middle-childhood up to and including his enlisting in the army during the Vietnam war, a decision he quickly realises was folly, and subsequent efforts at resistance and desertion. The novel ends with the narrator aged 72, now living in Cyprus, engaged in a slightly far-fetched effort at high-tech Robin-Hood-ery in vengeance at those American corporations who profited from making weapons for the US war effort in Vietnam.

Skin It Back’s premise is promising: bookish, bespectacled, nature-loving, middle-class Catholic altar boy signs up for war in defiance of what he perceives to be his peers’ cowardice at dodging the draft only to learn that real cowardice is submission to an unethical, ignorant, genocidal war machine. But while there are excellent segments, especially those dealing with Lowell’s basic training (his outings to San Antonio, including a brilliantly demoralising trip to the Alamo, are depicted with real sharpness), the book feels uneven both structurally and in characterisation.

The first section, which looks at Lowell’s interactions with nature in his native Massachusetts seems determined to establish the narrator as an incipient Thoreau, but unfortunately labours the point without much benefit to the reader. The rest of the book moves at a far more enjoyable pace, and while this keeps us engaged, it is hard to fully buy into the character of Lowell. First off, despite being bookish and bespectacled, he’s a magnet for virtually every attractive female he lays eyes on. Perhaps this is what life was like in the 60s and I was born three decades too late, but it feels like a stretch to this bookish and bespectacled reader. Second, Lowell’s openly avowed fixation with the erotic, results in almost everything being tied back to some sexual experience (teenage boys are horny, we get it, but give the reader some respite). Finally, Lowell is relentlessly, unbelievably righteous. The book cries out for at least some little darkness to its narrator.

There is plenty to enjoy in Skin It Back, but one feels that self-publication, despite its positives, in this case meant that there was no outside voice to help the author find the balance his book would so benefit from.