... the truly significant aspect of his work is that he tells a story about one of America’s most recent wars that will seem alien to most of the American public ... Accordingly, it is a book about the absurdity of the way the war is fought, the way the war is projected back home, and the massive gulf between the two ... Like characters in a Laurence Sterne novel, they have great and meaningful names ... This work will almost certainly infuriate many who pick it up. It does not glamorize the heroics of those fighting on the so-called front lines. It does not speak to the worldview that has mostly associated itself with the current wars. And it does not tell a particularly flattering story of American culture, either. But it does tell a story that many who lived it will remember. It does update the classic wartime themes for this generation’s war, and hopefully it will open the door for other literary perspectives to be developed in the future ... a cynical satire in the same vein as the best works of legendary wartime authors like Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, and especially Joseph Heller.

Abrams makes some beginner’s errors: the dialogue is occasionally stilted, and I wish he spent more time with the actual Fobbits instead of the infantryman Capt. Abe Shrinkle, whose incompetence makes Gooding’s job more challenging. At the start of the book, there is a joke about the illicit relationship between a couple of young enlistees, Simon and Allison. It’s funny — but it also gets at the intimacy of war, the primordial connection, the need for human contact in the face of death. Fobbit could have done with more of this. But this is a minor complaint, and in fact I applaud David Abrams for sticking to his vision and writing the satire he wanted to write instead of adding to the crowded shelf of war memoirs. In Fobbit, he has written a very funny book, as funny, disturbing, heartbreaking and ridiculous as war itself.

The problem with writing a darkly comic novel about soldiers caught in the maelstrom of modern warfare is that it inevitably invites comparison with Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22, which is unfortunate, because, let’s face it, there’s only one Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. Abrams seems to concede this tacitly in the text — his alter ego Gooding is reading the book by a swimming pool in Qatar while on R&R — and more pointedly again in his acknowledgments ... But Abrams does have a genuine sense of humor that is more often than not on point, and a productive sense of irony to go with it that takes full advantage of a milieu in which irony abounds. Fobbit is an impressive debut and holds out promise for more good things to come.

Abrams 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.

When your debut novel is very much in thrall to a particular classic book, and it pales in comparison to that classic, it's probably not the best idea to have your central, semi-autobiographical character walking around reading a copy it ... he certainly evokes the antagonism between fobbits and foot soldiers well, and his depiction of the idiosyncrasies of FOB Triumph, their base in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, is sharp and has the ring of authenticity ... But the author fails to create any focus or forward momentum to his narrative ... And worse, Abrams's satirical swipes are tame ... At least the passages on cynical press manipulation are engaging ... In comparison, the rest of the comedy relies on heavy-handed slapstick and fart, piss and crap jokes, none of which made this reviewer laugh once.

Abrams has a definite comic talent and a lively turn of phrase. The set-pieces are well done – there's an agonisingly plausible one involving an unexploded car bomb rammed up the backside of a tank – and the dialogue zings back and forth cheerily enough. Abrams is a good writer, in other words. I'm less convinced that he's a novelist. He struggles to assemble a plot, and his characteristic mode of comic exaggeration doesn't leave him with anywhere much to go in terms of a gear change. When he shucks the cynicism, he risks mawkishness ... Much of the most interesting material in Fobbit is the stuff that reads like reportage or memoir ... It's not an insult to Abrams to say that Fobbit suffers badly from the comparison it invites. As Heller is said to have replied when someone pointed out that he'd never written anything else as good as Catch-22: 'Who has?'

Which of the characters is going to be reduced to this statistic drives the narrative of the book and Abrams is right to lampoon both this absurd obsession and also the army’s ham-fisted attempts to control the narrative during wartime ... Unfortunately, though, he has largely missed an opportunity to write a potentially great book about war and storytelling, and how one impacts on the other in our PR-controlled times ... while there’s no doubt Abrams has captured the patois of the base...too often this language infiltrates the narration and this, combined with an over-reliance on slapstick, makes the comedy too broad for comparisons to Catch-22 to stand up ... It’s actually when Abrams eschews the quick laugh, as he does in Gooding’s diary entries which, one suspects, are based on his own, that his writing is most elegant, and these passages are evidence that he might yet make a telling contribution to the story of that wretched war.

Abrams’s debut is a harrowing satire of the Iraq War and an instant classic ... A series of bombings, street battles, and media debacles test all of these men and, although there are exciting combat scenes, the book’s most riveting moments are about crafting spin, putting the 'Iraqi Face' on the conflict ... Abrams...brings great authority and verisimilitude to his depictions of these attempts to shape the perceptions of the conflict ... Abrams’s prose is spot-on and often deadpan funny ... This novel nails the comedy and the pathos, the boredom and the dread, crafting the Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.

While the narrative generally feeds off Gooding, it is peopled with far more outlandish and intriguing characters ... Abrams saves his best work for two supporting characters, Lt. Col. Vic Duret, a hard-driving, stressed-out, uber-responsible battalion commander haunted by his brother-in-law’s death in the World Trade Center attack, and the inept and fear-filled Capt. Abe Shrinkle, a West Pointer who bungles his way into shooting an innocent Iraqi civilian on one mission and incinerating another on the next. More a Fobbit’s Jarhead than a Yossarian Catch-22, although one character meets a Kid Sampson-like fate ... Sardonic and poignant. Funny and bitter. Ribald and profane. Confirmation for the anti-war crowd and bile for Bush supporters.