PositiveThe Washington PostAbrams writes what he knows from an insulated workstation in Iraq where the war is edited for America ... We gain a rare gestalt perspective on the journey that news takes as we follow five main characters from the patrols outside the defensive perimeter to life inside with the Fobbits ... in the end this book is unlike any of these classic satires because it never really gives itself much fantastical distance from the war. This is a fictionalized transcription of an effort still close enough to find its own humor awkward, a conflict strange enough to allow military eccentrics to seem entirely familiar and infuriatingly human ... Though absurd, these Dickensian characters are all so skillfully wrought that we quickly accept their idiosyncrasies. The language alternates between comic ranting and serious description, especially in the division between Gooding’s inner voice and that of his diary, which contains some of the novel’s most undisguised personal fieldnotes from the author ... What’s most intriguing about this work is that, at its center, it is both a clever study in anxiety and an unsettling expose of how the military tells its truths.
Brian Van Reet
PositiveThe Washington PostThe sensory depth and description of place is perfect throughout, as Van Reet draws on his experience to paint the sunburned barrens and the hot claustrophobic interiors of trucks, tanks and concrete rooms. The sentences feel weighed with living under these conditions ... This is a raw study in the ruin of men. It’s unapologetic and confessional, showing the flaws in humanity just below the skin ... Van Reet shows that no one wins a war like this, and, at some point, everyone fighting in it knows.
Robert Olen Butler
RaveThe Washington PostThere is great narrative efficiency in the prose, with sentences often spare and matched by constrained dialogue. This is writing harvested from a certain age, the point where people have lived in themselves long enough to stop talking so much, making conversation with little more than body language and breathing ... This is such a quiet novel — domestic, nostalgic, built on caution and patience, with wars seeping underneath. At times, the writing is hallucinatory ... The story builds its force with great care, though the end is a bit hurried, everyone conveniently arranged for collision. Its power is that we want to keep reading. The entire journey is masterfully rendered, Butler lighting a path back into the cave, completely unafraid.
