Kenneth Champeon

Aspiring novelists are apt to underestimate the price the life exacts from an author. "Writing a book," said Orwell, "is a horrible, exhausting struggle." And quite often writers are as disastrous in their personal lives as they are exalted on the page. One such human tornado is the protagonist of Adam O'Fallon Price's bitter but authentic debut novel, The Grand Tour.

The writer, Richard, is a Vietnam veteran with a drinking problem, some failed marriages and an estranged daughter. The damaged Vietnam veteran is a Hollywood trope, but salable: after a few mediocre novels, Richard strikes gold with a war memoir. Portions of the memoir appear in Price's novel. They are unconvincing, but we later get a good if shocking explanation for this.

Price includes these excerpts because they are readings during Richard's book tour. Hence the novel's title, which also plays on yesteryear's upper-class romps through continental Europe. Yet Price's America is an ugly one, especially when seen through Richard's jaundiced eyes.

Richard’s companion on the tour is Vance, an impressionable 19-year-old who worships Richard for his writing but finds the person an unreliable nihilist. Richard has gravitas, but his writing is the only thing redeeming a life of conventional failure. (Orwell wrote about that too.) He even tells Vance to do something useful, to do anything but write.

The novel thus becomes an extended effort to justify itself against its subject's negations. Every occasion on which a blotto Richard ascends another dais is a grim triumph over human absurdity. He repeats his mantra to anyone who will listen: "The book sold."

Price, meanwhile, is a witty and mordant writer with substantial largeness of heart. He's akin to Frederick Exley, or a breezier Malcolm Lowry. For all the meretricious longueurs about Vietnam, the novel is one of the most believable American novels of the past few years, a kind of On the Road for the lumpenproletariat. Price may or may not be a wreck himself, but one hopes he doesn't take Richard's advice.

"The windiest militant trash/Important Persons shout." Thus wrote Auden on the eve of WWII, but we hear the same bluster on today's campaign trail. Harry Parker's Anatomy of a Soldier is a somber reminder of what war does to actual soldiers.

The novel recalls Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. It considers soldiers from the perspective of the objects associated with them. These objects do, in fact, narrate the novel. This is a bold, possibly gimmicky approach. It is effective for some objects—a drone, for instance, or a Kalashnikov. It is less effective for others, like boots. Indeed the narration sometimes approaches the homoerotic. "He moved his hand up my shaft," to choose one example, about a rifle. A catheter's thoughts about BA5799 are best left unsaid.

BA5799 has a name: Tom Barnes. But the author may suggest that we treat soldiers like objects. When killed, we dispose of them. When damaged, we repair them with prosthetics. This happens to Barnes. We know this because his prothesis says so. And bystanders sometimes think he resembles a robot. But soldiers are not robots. Barnes feels remorse and sorrow. He loves a woman and he sometimes loves war.

Like Parker, Barnes serves with the British Army in a country like Afghanistan. Barnes offers $2,000 to a father whose son the British Army kills. Parker is commendable for trying to include such stories. But occupier and occupied resent the occupation. They believe it has only worsened things. Even so, Barnes holds no grudge against his attackers. Convalescing back home, he insists he would buy them a drink.

Parker seems to be aiming for Hemingway. At its best, the novel recalls the first devastating chapter of A Farewell to Arms. But elsewhere Parker is less terse and more sentimental. He is more late, boozy Hemingway than otherwise. When Parker writes that in war "no one wins" he is trafficking in a cliche that lends no solution to war's problems. 

Hemingway broke ground writing about the price that modern war exacts. Parker, too, provides an antidote to the latest windiest militant trash Important Persons shout. 

The occupation of Iraq was as nebulous as the reasons for the original invasion. Indeed, the war's raisons d'être multiplied as the years progressed. In Matt Gallagher's important debut novel, Youngblood, a lieutenant stationed in Iraq asks the trillion-dollar question: "Just what . . . were we doing?"

The ephemerality and pointlessness of this postmodern war pervade the novel's skeletal plot. Lieutenant Jack Porter goes on missions, people are killed, mosques are destroyed, blood money is offered. Soldiers stage fights between spiders and scorpions for amusement; they read misleading press releases to incredulous reporters. Vehicles are dismantled to avoid falling into enemy hands. Ultimately, Porter's only worthwhile endeavor is arranging an Iraqi family's escape from the country. He does this despite his more bellicose superiors, who refer to Iraq as "Indian country.”

Gallagher is best when conveying the predictable hostility of Iraq's people and geography. Like many Americans, Porter protested the invasion, or "collapse," as Iraqis called it. But, like his compatriots, he becomes determined to see the war through. Between attachments to the Iraqis and his fellow soldiers, and the rush of combat, he finds purposefulness amidst the waste and pain. He's no innocent, however. He boasts 48 kills, wants a "real war" and snaps dubiously that America "wins wars.” Striking imperial poses, he derides the Iraqis' lack of punctuality.

Gallagher is a former U.S. Army captain who blogged about his own deployment in Iraq. The novel sometimes resembles a mishmash of blog and screenplay; it's mostly dialogue, some action, less Weltschmerz. It has the light footprint American planners always hoped for in Iraq, but provides no easy answers. It's chaotic and sometimes nonsensical. But as Gallagher writes, "the truest war stories made the least sense."