A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Most of what I knew about A Separate Peace before reading it was that it was one of those 20th century curriculum books like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies that schools like to assign, and that Lisa and Grandma Simpson hate it. I also struggled to see how it fit in with Knowles’ other work until I realized I was mixing him up with John Fowles. That’s what they get for having names that rhyme.

The story takes place at a New England boarding school called Devon during the middle years of World War II. The narrator, Gene Forrester, is a top student who is enamoured with his roommate Phineas, a preternaturally gifted athlete whose breezy way of life and effortless charm make him Gene’s perfect foil. Despite their difference, the two are close friends, though Gene harbours a one-sided resentment of Phineas that festers into a paranoid assumption that his pranks and amusements are intended to undercut Gene’s academic success.

Gene eventually realizes his mistake, but rather than clean the infection, understanding merely drives it deeper, ultimately causing him to knock Phineas out of a tree and cause him a life-altering injury. The rest of the book deal with the consequences of this action. Like the bone in his leg, Phineas’ friendship with Gene reforms in the following, lumpy and misshapen yet in some ways stronger than before. Much is left ambiguous regarding why Gene did what he did, how conscious of an act it was, and to what extent Phineas realizes what happened. He rebuffs Gene’s initial confession and the whole things gets papered over, though later revelations make you question how Phineas really feels.

The book is interesting and well-told, convincingly narrated by an educated man looking back on his life. Perhaps not truly the ninth-grade level for a precocious student, but hardly pre-school.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I read this over a month ago and I think I’ve missed a book or two in between. In any case, The Age of Innocence is one of the many 100 Great 20th Century Novels about unhappy rich people, and I can’t say that is one of my favourite genres (another big one among those books I don’t much care for is Male Writer Suffers Ennui in New England). I got through this one and didn’t mind reading it, so I would consider it a strong book on that fact alone.

The story concerns Newland Archer, a wealthy New York socialite who practices law more as a hobby than a career. He is betrothed to the equally wealthy May Welland, but before the wedding date is set her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe. Separated from her husband—a Count—and unfamiliar with the mores of 19th century New York, Ellen fascinated Newland, and next to her his fiancé seems hopelessly dull. He asks her to push forward the wedding, hoping that being finally married will put paid to his conflicted emotions, but she resists.

Most of the story concerns the shadow courtship between Newland and Ellen, both of whom struggle with attraction and guilt. The writing is coy in typical fashion for the era, and I’m not sure if they are ever intimate beyond holding hands (though maybe I missed something, being a typically unsubtle 21st century reader).

The writing is strong, and the characters are rich and well-drawn. Apparently the story draws on Wharton’s own childhood in terms of setting, and the details feel true to life. I doubt I’ll read it again, but that’s more a question of my interests than the book’s quality. Those into Jane Austen and the like will enjoy it.

Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was one of my four go-to authors through high school, and by the time I left home for university I’d read all of the books of his my parents had, except for one: Deadeye Dick. The (fairly stupid) reason for this was that their copy was either poorly bound or mistreated (or both), and as a result most of the pages would come free as soon as you turned them. I was never comfortable takin it out of the house, and because I did most of my reading on the school bus, I kept giving it a miss.

I’ve picked up a few Vonnegut books since high school (mostly re-reads), but that dumb prejudice kept me from picking it up until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally decided to read the thing, and if it fell apart in my hands, who the hell cares?

It would be a neat irony if it turned out Deadeye Dick was far and away my favourite Vonnegut book, but reality isn’t so tidy. It’s a good book—I’ve never read a Vonnegut that wasn’t—and very much in his milieu, but I don’t think it is quite the equal of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, or Breakfast of Champions (which most people don’t consider one of his best, but remains a favourite of mine).

The story follows Vonnegut’s familiar obsession with bizarre characters caroming off each other in peculiar coincidences. The narrator, a pharmacist and self-professed “neuter” named Rudy Waltz, recounts his life and that of his helpless bohemian parents. At twelve years old, Rudy fired a gun off his roof at nothing in particular and accidentally murdered a pregnant woman. The resulting arrest and lawsuit ruins his family socially and financially, and he becomes their caregiver, a role he doesn’t seem to particularly resent.

Like most Vonnegut novels, Deadeye Dick bounces between points in time, talking one moment about his venture opening a hotel in Haiti, the next about his short-lived career as a published playwrite. Rudy’s defining trait is his apathy/ Nothing in life excites him, and he recounts everything with muted emotion.

This isn’t the book I’d give someone as an introduction to Vonnegut, but for a fan it’s certainly worth a read.

Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I loved The Mosquito Coast, which is what drew me to pick up Mother Land from a book store. The book is billed as a novel, but Theroux takes pains to make it feel as autobiographical as possible: the narrator is a travel write and novelist with two sons, and many of the family members referenced in the book correspond to real people in Theroux’s life, albeit with different names.

This lends a certain queasiness to the story, as the characters are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant people to be around. And no one is more unpleasant than the titular mother of Mother Land, a vain, narcissistic woman who sees her children more as treasures of conquest than actual people. The book chronicles a period stretching most of the narrator’s (Jay, though he may as well be named Paul) life, though it focuses primarily on two points: one period in his young adulthood when he fathered a child out of wedlock, and another in his middle age when his father dies and he moves back to Cape Cod. The plot is light and episodic, focused more on the interactions between the siblings than on events. There is a certain repetitiveness to the story, and we get the sense by the last fifty pages that Jay’s mother will simply never die. That she is somehow eternal, a creature of avarice feeding off her own young.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Mother Land, though that’s not to say the book was boring or bad. Theroux’s writing is rich, and his characters have great psychological depth. They just aren’t very nice people. I had no trouble picking p the book to read it, but when it was over, my biggest feeling was of relief. It’s a feeling shared by the children at their mother’s death, so this sensation may be deliberate. If so, then it’s a bold literary move and one Theroux should be proud of. It takes courage to write such an ugly book, especially one that most readers will assume is about you and your family.

Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce

I’ve never seen Cool Hand Luke, and was only aware of it from pop culture references until picking up Donn Pearce’s novel. I didn’t know what to expect beyond it being about a nonconformist prisoner who eats a lot of eggs. As a novel, it exceeded my expectations, narrrated in a dreamy, impressionistic style by a man named Sailor, about whom we know almost nothing.

Cool Hand Luke uses first person pedestal narration. which is a writing workshop way of saying that the narrator is a character but not the main one. The narrrator can feature prominently (think Fifth Business or To Kill a Mockingbird) or tangentially (think the Great Gatsby or Breakfast at Tiffany’s) but they are not the protagonist. Rather, the serve to bear witness to the protagonist, who is usually a tragic figure. In Cool Hand Luke, the narrator is kept so vague that he is barely a character—chapters can go by when you forget that he’s in the story, and not just a disembodied voice telling it. This feelign is underscored by the prose, which uses a non-colloquial poetic diction to convey scenes.

This is contrasted with portions narrated by another inmate, Dragline, who accompanied Luke on his final, fatal escap eattempt. Much of the novel is actually takign place during one of Dragline’s retelling of this episode to new inmates, though Sailor, our ghostly narrator, gives his version of events for much of the same period. There’s no line breaks or even dialogue tags to indicate who is speaking, but Pearce handles the transitions well with his command of vernacular dialogue. It’s always quite clear when we’re listening to Dragline or Luke and when we’re listening to Sailor.

The story is itself fairly simple, mostly the arc of Luke’s arrival at the prison, ascension to a place of honor among the inmates, and a gnawing dissatisfaction that forces him to escape again and again wtih a desperation that flirts wit hthe suicidal. The story is well realised and well told. A truly excellent novel. I’m surprised Pearce didn’t write more, though it seems he only published another two before taking a prolonged hiatus to do other work. I’ll have to seek these out at some point.

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

I’ve owned a copy of Mason & Dixon for a very long time but never had a strong urge to pick it up, in large part because I had intended to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow as my first major Pynchon work (I read The Crying of Lot 49 a while ago, but it is, in its slight hundred or so pages, scarcely Pynchonian in breadth, if comparable in density). But, for whatever reason, I was looking for something meaty and Mason & Dixon seemed the more attractive option.

The story is ostensibly a fictionalized account of Charles Mason and Jeremiah' Dixon’s journey to chart their eponymous line to resolve a border dispute between Pennsylvania in Maryland. But simply calling it “a fictionalized account” is misleading, as it suggests at most some narrative tidying and invention of secondary characters to make a more cohesive and rounded story. A better description would be to say it takes the story of Mason and Dixon and some of the founding myths of pre-Revolutionary America and tosses them in a blender with about 20 blotters of LSD. The “fictionalized” elements aren’t simply things that didn’t happen (chance meetings with Washington and Benjamin Franklin, for instance), but things that are outright supernatural. There’s an invisible robot duck that’s in love with a Frenchman, a conversation between two clocks, a field of gigantic vegetables (think James and the Giant Peach big), and a talking dog, among other things.

These elements are jumbled together by a frame narrator named Reverend Cherrycoke, who interjects regularly with his own supposition and is interrupted by his niece and nephew. The story veers regularly off course, and there are few signposts to guide you through dialogue or indicate when one scene blends into another, which they do regularly and with hedge maze circuity. The whole book feels like it was deliberately written to be as hard to follow as possible without descending into outright gibberish. Pynchon toes that line deftly, though to call it a pleasurable read would be a stretch. This is a book that wants to be a workout, and while certain passages and images are rewarding, I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what had happened in any given chapter.

Pynchon is a noted stylist, and his writing in this book deftly apes the sound and texture of 18th century prose, complete with esoteric Capitalization and antique verbosity. His humor is pleasantly modern, though its occasional crudity is actually in line with the period it is trying to evoke (recall that the Western Canon’s proto-novel, Don Quixote, includes a scene where Sancho Ponza takes a sneaky dump off the side of his horse, and another where he and Quixote vomit into each others’ faces). I wouldn’t say I enjoyed reading this book, at least not all the time, but I’m glad I read it.

And one day, I really will tackle Gravity’s Rainbow.

The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

The Jungle is one of those books I’d heard spoken of for years. For some reason, I’d always thought it was a journalistic account of Chicago’s meat-packing industry. However, it’s actually a novel, and while it is allegedly supported by accounts from Upton Sinclair’s stint working undercover in a meat-packing plant, it is nevertheless wholly fictional.

The story concerns a Lithuanian family who immigrates to America at the turn fo the 20th century. At the center of the story is Jurgis Rudkus, a large and preternaturally strong man who begins with an idealized vision of the New World and his place in it. Slowly, through a series of misfortunes exacernbated by the callousness of the industry and the peripheral figures who prey on its victims—for instance, a duplicitous realtor who sells them a house with strings attached—the family is ground down by capitalism.

Jurgis, beaten by fate, becomes a tramp before returning and wheedling his way into the political machinery of the city. Here he lives a large but vacuous existence that crumbles due to long-simmering avarice. At his lowet, he discovers socialism, and ends the book a devoted convert. The last chapters barely concern him at all, but are instead verbatim speeched from impassioned socialists, and a recounting of the 1904 election where socialists performed well, with an ecstatci prophecy of coming victory.

It will come as no surprise to readers that Sinclair was himself a socialist, and saw the book as a way to demonstrate the inherent evils of capitalism, and the potential salvation offered by his ideaology. Apart from the strident, almost non-sequitor ending, I didn’t find the moral too imposing on the story. Jurgis seemed like a real man, and his struggle,s while intense, were believable. Life really was brutal for working class people at the time, and while Sinclair’s heart is unquestionably on his sleeve, I wouldn’t accuse him of exaggerating anything ,for the simple reason that he didn’t have to.

Sinclair’s prose is crisp and of its era, easy to read and lively without being too florid. I suspect I’d find the book harder to take if I was less in sympathy with his outlook, but whatever your politics, he can clearly write a novel. I’d be interested to read some of his other work

Billy Summers - Stephen King

I find it hard to believe that this is my first post about a Stephen King book, which would suggest I’ve gone nearly two years without reading anything by him. I know I’ve missed most of his newest stuff, but I usually reread something of his on a fairly regular basis. In any case, it was a welcome return to my first favourite author, and the writer who more than anyone else inspired me to write my own stories.

Billy Summers, the novel’s eponymous lead, is an Iraq war veteran and assassin hired for one final job. It’s a common premise, borderline cliche, and King makes no effort to hide it. But of course things aren’t that simple, and the beats the story follows are both unexpected and familiar. Unexpected because they diverge from the common tropes that would have made Billy Summers a more conventional and lesser book, and familiar because they very much play to two of King’s favourite themes: the bonds of community, and the power of the written word.

The first theme plays out as Summers ensconces himself in the neighbourhood where he establishes himself prior to that big final job, and again later, after the job is over, through a chance encounter with a young woman named Alice Maxwell. Alice is really the crux of the story, as she pulls the novel from its familiar rails and into far less trodden—and far more interesting—terrain. It’s a joy to read King as he establishes these relationships, as he is probably the best writer I know and making you feel like this is a reall community, and to care not just about the characters themselves, but about the relationships between them.

The second theme emerges as Billy’s cover story, which is that he is a writer cloistering himself away to finish the book. The details are fairly maddening to anyone trying to make it in the business these days, and suggest that King, though obviously intimately familiar with publishing, has perhaps a rosier than true picture of what being an emerging writer these days is like—Billy’s persona, an unknown and unpublished author, lands an agent after writing a couple of chapters of a novel, and the agent is then able not only to hook a major publisher for a potential seven-figure deal, but when he isn’t finishing the manuscript fast enough, gets a $50,000 advance without delivering anything (excuse me while I scream into a pillow). I get that this is a story concocted by characters who are not writers themselves, but it’s supposed to be plausible.

In any case, the heart of the theme comes when Billy starts writing, which provides catharsis for him while simultaneously informing us of his backstory. it’s a neat device, and King handles it well, switching effortlessly between voices. there is even a bit at the end that plays with the theme of writing as wish fulfillment, and King wisely concedes the limits of writing in shaping the world, even as he espouses its power (I was happy that Billy didn’t somehow become a best seller, whcih would have been cloying and ridiculous).

King’s prose is solid. He is not the world’s foremost stylist, but he has the self-assurance of an old pro and handles his words deftly, providing bits of linguistic filigree where the enhance without making everything too ornamental. As a writer, he’s story and character first (not sure which I’d grant primacy over which; perhaps it varies between books), prose second. And his dialogue rings true as ever. Reading him felt like visiting with an old friend. I suspect I’ll be picking up a lot more of his stuff, new and old, in the near future.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider - Katherine Anne Porter

I checked out Pale Horse, Pale Rider because someone in a newspaper comments section said it was the only significant work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Flu epidemic. I have no idea if that’s true, but the titular story is excellent and does seem to nicely encapsulate the convergence of tragedies that struck the world in 1918, as a horrific war ended just as an equally horrific—in terms of body count, at least— plague raged along its murderous crescendo. I say titular story because Pale Horse, Pale Rider is not one novel but rather three short ones, two of which may or may not be connected (the protagonist of Old Mortality has the same name as the woman in Pale Horse, Miranda, so I assume they could be the same person, though I didn’t pore back over the first novel to find clues to confirm or deny this.)

Of the three novels, the middle one, Noon Wine, may actually be the strongest. It concerns a farmer swimming exhausted against a riptide of insolvency until a stoic Swedish immigrant arrives from seemingly nowhere and drags him from the depths and into quiet prosperity. All seems well, despite an undercurrent of unease, until a stranger arrives in the third act and forces the farmer to make a snap and costly decision. I can see why Pale Horse got the title, as it’s a great story and carries the most symbolic heft, but I would say I enjoyed Noon Wine most of the three. Old Mortality was good as well, though it was one of those family history stories, in which young characters glean the failings of their elders, and while the details were smart and well-rendered, it didn’t pull me along as strongly as Noon Wine did.

Porter’s prose is exeptional, rich and lyrical, with a tendency to roam that I admire when it goes right, as it does in all three novels. I’m surprised I’d never heard of her before, considering she was apparently a prominent short story writer from an era I often read. I’ll be certain to pick up more from her in the future.

USA Trilogy - John Dos Passos

As you might expect from it’s title, the USA Trilogy is three books, not one, but they are sufficiently interconnected that they really operate as a single novel. If it weren’t for the separate tables of contents and title pages, I wouldn’t have suspected that the book was anything but a single sprawling novel.

And sprawling is the word, for Dos Passos’ work is nothing if not ambitious. Using a varie,d daring style, Dos Passos attempts to capture a period of American history from about 1910 to 1930, with periodic jaunts outside of this scope, both spatial and temporal. Indeed, much of the second book is set in France in the closing days of World War I, where soldiers and army volunteers struggle to transition to peacetime and capitalists seize on the abruptly shifted world order to make a killing.

There are a number of characters, but no clear protagonist, with individual players dropping in and out of the narrative. Characters who are central in one point can be relegated to small parts in other points of view later on, and some are dropped altogether—notably Mac, the young Wobbly who forms the core of the first half of book one before disappearing from the pages and never being spoke of again. If I had to select a main character, I’d pick J Ward Moorehouse, a failed songwriter whose intelligence, craftiness, and upward marriages allow him to build a successful advertising agency. But evem he is only a point of view character in the first book, shifting afterwards to appearances in the story through other eyes.

Interpresed through the main narrative are biographies of notable figures from American history during the period, as well as two more experimental sections: Newsreels, which feature snippets of headlines, news stories, and song lyrics crosscutting in a disorienting fashion, sometimes mid-sentences, and “The Camera Eye,” in which stories of unrelated and largely anonymous characters are told in a dizzy stream of conscious style.

The book isn’t an easy one to follow, and even without large breaks between readings, I often forgot who was who and what individual characters had done in prior installments. Still, the writing feels fresh even 90 years later, the characters speak with rich, developed voices, and the story carries an undeniable sense of verisimilitude. Dos Passos captures small things, and magpies them together into a towering narrative.

The Stories of John Cheever - John Cheever

It had been over a decade since I’d last read Cheever, and my exposure to him before now was exclusively through his novels. I recalled enjoying them, but my memory was vague. Mostly I recalled images of upper crust New England, antiquated blue bloods who drifted into upper midle class suburbia in the first half of the 20th century. I expected much the same from his short stories, and thought this an interesting counterpoint to the last book I read, which collected the stories of Flannery O’Connor, another American writer with a gift for capturing the soul of her region of that vast and multicameral country.

My first impression wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete. The first half of The Stories of John Cheever is set principally in New England, and concerns either members of old stock New England families, with their beach houses and servant staff, or their modern suburban equivalents. However, the bulk of the stories in the second half take place in Rome, and focus more on America as an identity than a place.

This surprised me, but what surprised me more than the shift in location was his occasional dip into other literary conventions beyond what I would call—for lack of a better term and due to a dislike of the term “literary fiction”—modern realism, the sort of stories in which the author plumbs the depths of their characters’ minds as they go about their largely plotless lives, culminating in some sort of epiphany. There are stories like The Enormous Radio, which one could argue is science fiction, but is more a satire than anything; dark hints of fantasy in such stories as Torch Song and The Music Teacher, which throw an ominous, otherworldly cast on certain characters without directly commiting to supernatural occurrences; and bouts of absurdism, best highlighted by the Death of Justina—my favorite story in the collection, in which the dispirited narrator waxes in pompous prose about his unfulfilling job, and is forced to carry his wife’s cousin’s body to a neighboring street in order for the coroner to accept her, as the narrator’s house is not zoned for death and dying is strictly forbidden.

Cheever varies his style to match the tone of his story, adopting different narrative voices in first and third person, but there remains a distinct “Cheeverness” throughout, an erudition and fondness for building sentences or metaphors like great Jenga Towers, their tottering precarity underscoring the deftness with which they were constructed. Reading the collection has inspired me to revisit the novels I haven’t read in some time.

The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor

As the name suggests, The Complete Stories compiles every short story Flannery O’Connor published. Apart from her two novels, a collection of essays, and personal correspondence, the 31 stories in this volume are the sum total of her literary output, and while her death from lupus at only 39 left us sadly bereft of a lifetime of what would doubtlessly have been phenomenal work, the stories she wrote in her short time as an author still bear more heft and talent than any writer of her generation could possibly boast.

Most of The Complete Stories is a repackaging of her two earlier collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, though there are also some early stories that she chose not to include in her debut collection, works that likely were intended for collection number three, and extracts form her novels, bot hthe two she published and a third, Why do the heathen Rage, which remains only a tantalizing fragment. The excerpts from her other two novels were interesting to read, as they are earlier versions tha tunderwent significant revision before appearing in their final forms. Seeing them in what amounts to draft stage offers a fascinating glimpse into her craft.

I have little to say about the stories except that they are incredible, and that Flannery O’Connor is one of the all time greatest writers of America, if not the world. I think her novel work gets short shrift, but reading or (in most cases) rereading the stories that form the foundation of her legacy, it’s easy to understand why she is revered as a short story writer first. It really was her strongest genre, allowing her to paint vignettes of her native south with startling clarity, rich characters that reach far beyond the limits of the page, and an all-encompassing faith that deepens the meaning of her words without succumbing to ham-fisted preaching.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

It seems kind of pointless to explain who the main character of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer is. You know him already, as I did long before I finally got around to reading it. My only previous encounter with Tom was from Huckleberry Finn, which I read in high school and liked well enough. Comparing the two is difficult, given how long it's been. I got different things out of both books, but whetherit that's a result of the books or me is hard to say.

One thing that struck me about Tom Sawyer is how episodic it feels. There is an overarching plot involving the boys witnessing a murder and a stolen treasure, but its first inklings don't appear until almost a third of the way through the book, and drop off regularly to explore the minutia of daily life as a boy, which seems to be the book's true passion. The plot heavy stuff almost seems like an excuse to justify the gags and slice-of-life vignettes, which is where Twain excells and where the book comes most to life. It's no surprise that the most famous scene, where Tom tricks the neighborhood children into whitewashing a fence for him, has nothing to do with Injun Joe or stolen gold at all.

The plot is fun as a parody of adventure stories popular at the time, but the book's greatest strength is its humor, and a lot of spots were very funny. I don't recall seeing Huck Finn that way, but again that may have been a lack of familiarity with older literature. In any case, my appetite has been sufficiently whetted to make me pick it back up in the near future.

The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer

Gary Gilmore had spent over half of his life in prison when, only several months after getting parole, he killed two men in two separate, cold-blooded, and entirely pointless acts of violence. Both crimes were ostensibly committed during robberies, but Gary didn’t seem that interested in the money and made calculated and deliberate decisions to kill. No one exactly knows why, least fo all Gary.

These events form the fulcrum on which the vast, sprawling narrative of the Executioner’s Song pivots, with the lead-up of Gary’s troubled life pulling down on one end against the counterweight of justice on the other. The result is a powerful, if at times exhausting, work of new journalism, similar in structure to a novel but distinct enough that the subtitle “A True Life Novel” feels more like a bit of marketing than an accurate summary. Mailer uses some of the tools common to novelists—shifting his prose to reflect the points of view of various characters, for instance—but the dry insistance on detail and use of supporting sources feels more journalistic than novelistic.

The story is immense and detailed almost to the point of pedantry, with whole chapters—arguably whole sections—devoted to such anicillary fare as the surrounding media frenzy and quest for life rights. In the book’s second half, Gary becomes almost hollowed out as a figure, the story less about him than about the interests orbiting around him. Still, Gary Gilmore emerges as a complex figure, and Mailer manages to imbue him with a level of humanity that is almost uncomfortabl,e given the atrocity of his crimes.

Mailer’s prose is solid, evocative without hyperbole, shifting sleekly between the florid images of literary fiction and the homespun cadence spoken by the characters who populate the story. I’ve read a couple of his books in the past, but it has been some time and the Executioner’s Song reminded me how much I like his writing.

The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

I’m several episodes into Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Civil War, and it inspired me to revisit The Red Badge of Courage, a book I hadn’t read in decades and barely remembered. It tells the story of Henry Fleming, a young man who leaves his small town to become a soldier in the Union army.

Though it depicts several battles in great detail, much of the book’s action is internal, as Henry struggles with his competing fears of death and cowardice. He spends much of the book’s first section obsessing over how he will fare in battle, by turns certain he will display valor and terrified that he will crumble under the pressure. Rattled by a Confederate charge, he flees, and the middle section finds him fighting on two fronts: a practical one, as he decides whether to desert entirely or slink back to his regiment, and a personal one, as he wallows in self-disgust at his cowardice and jealousy of the wounds of his comrades, which he sees as signs of bravery—or red badges of courage, as the title has it.

The prose is lyrical but dens,e filled with rich detail that can illuminate moments while leaving the broader action somewhat obscured. There is an opacity to the text that may be deliberate, a little like WIlliam Faulkner’s tendency to sidestep key moments and view them only on the periphery. This sensation is further enforced by Crane’s insistent use of descriptions rather than names to identify characters. Henry is referred to almost exclusively as “the youth” by the narrator, his name gleaned by the reader only through dialogue. Othe characters are referred to in the same way, so we get “the tattered soldier,” “the lieutenant,” and “the loud soldier.”

Overall, I enjoyed the book, though some of the passages feel sluggish and overburdened with description. I suspect this “slow motion” effect was deliberate, but even with a novel as short as this one, I couldn’t help but want the pace to pick up a bit at times.