Articles of War
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Maybe more novelists should study engineering. Articles of War, the powerful debut novel by automotive engineer Nick Arvin, is a textbook example of how clear and precise writing can carry a narrative.
It's the story of an 18-year-old from Iowa thrust into combat in Europe at the end of World War II. George Tilson, nicknamed "Heck" because he promised his mother he wouldn't curse, comes to consider himself a coward, but that seems too simple, too easy.
Most war stories are about heroes. This is not one of them.
Heck, an innocent abroad, arrives in Normandy shortly after D-Day, prepared to do his duty. But a surprising encounter with a French family and a teenage girl triggers doubts about himself.
"He felt woefully young," Arvin writes. His "future was obscured by an enormous darkness, and his meager imagination felt like a pathetically small stick to poke into it."
We see the war only through Heck's eyes. He rarely knows what he's doing or why he's doing it. He's a passive participant in terror. He witnesses atrocities committed by Germans and Americans.
When Heck is wounded, "the sight seemed unreal to him, as though this were someone else's leg; he had never seen such a leg attached to himself before."
Arvin packs a lot into 178 pages. Like Stephen Crane, who wrote the classic Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, Arvin has never been in combat, although you wouldn't know that from his novel.
His details are simple yet devastating: Heck watches a soldier sprinkling sulfa powder into the empty socket of his own eye. Arvin paints a vivid portrait of the fog of war. He captures the chaos and confusion of combat that's often left out of the accounts, whether fact or fiction, written after the fog has lifted.
At first, Heck is annoyed by his fear: "It felt now like an object, exactly as if someone had cut him open, stuffed this thing inside, and sewn the flesh closed again."
In the end, he's called upon to do something unimaginable involving a character from history, Pvt. Eddie Slovik, an American convicted of desertion and executed by the U.S. military in France in 1945.
Even before that, Heck "could not imagine trying to explain what he had done in believable detail." Which is exactly what Arvin does so well in his small but memorable novel.
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