E-Mail This Article to a Friend War, by the book This spring, readers can turn to four new books that draw on real-life conflicts now past — though perhaps not yet over BY J.L. JOHNSON
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THE NOVELS THAT define a war don’t arrive neatly at war’s end, appearing on stage to explain to the audience something of the violent and contradictory drama they’ve just witnessed. Ernest Hemingway didn’t publish his World War I masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms, until 1929; Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 appeared more than a dozen years after the end of World War II. Though only five years passed from the end of US involvement in Vietnam to the publication of Tim O’Brien’s revelatory Going After Cacciato, America had already moved on to a new president and new national nightmares.

Two years after the first US troops landed in Baghdad, the war in Iraq still simmers, making its attendant body of literature very much a work in progress. For now, it is represented by biographical one-offs, such as that of Private Jessica Lynch, and war correspondents’ book-length reports, such as Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad, published last fall. But this war is too rich in bullies, moralists, and madmen, and too instructive a test of the world’s sole superpower, to imagine that novelists will not take its measure when it finally ends.

In the meantime, readers can turn to four new books this spring that draw on real-life conflicts now past — though perhaps not yet over. Whether the setting is Bosnia in the 1990s or Ball’s Bluff in the 1880s, each writer in some way tries to expand our understanding of The War and thereby help put it to rest. For, as Phillip Jennings writes in the foreword to his new Vietnam novel, Nam-A-Rama, long after the last soldier leaves the field, "there must be a descriptive end to bitterness and grief, anger and shame."

Pretty Birds (Random House, May 2005), by Scott Simon. In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star player on her school’s basketball team in Sarajevo. The Muslim teen worships Princess Diana and Madonna and is devoted to her pet parrot and to her best friend, a Christian. But in just a few months’ time, Irena will have been driven from her home, raped, separated from her friend, and finally tutored in the sniper’s art as Serbian forces wage their war of ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo. As the novel opens, in November, Irena is standing on a rooftop, chewing gum, and wondering where to put her last bullet before heading home. "Tedic, her chief, had told her not to shoot at children. The morals were dubious and the publicity devastating. On her own, Irena had decided she would not shoot at pets ... [or] at someone who looked like Sting, the Princess of Wales, or Katarina Witt."

The imagination behind this chilling scene belongs to Scott Simon, Weekend Edition host for National Public Radio. With its graphic sex scenes and several hard-eyed descriptions of wartime death, the narrative voice of Pretty Birds may be hard to reconcile with that program’s genial baritone; however, Simon lived the siege of Sarajevo as a reporter, and his anger at what he saw there is barely checked here. A particular target is the United Nations peacekeeping effort, the "Blue Helmets" who stood by as more than 10,000 residents were slaughtered. Serb leader Radovan Karadzic also appears briefly — a pompous would-be Keats — and Osama bin Laden makes a murderous cameo.

Simon layers in several other characters appropriate to the war’s complexity: Muslims, Jews, and Christians; civilians, rebels, and soldiers. But in the end Irena’s survival fight is the main story of Pretty Bird, and it is her weary cynicism in the face of an indifferent — or at least ineffectual — world community that lingers the longest. "You don’t have to explain to anyone these days why someone dies," she says. "Why is anyone still alive? That’s tricky."

March (Viking, 2005), by Geraldine Brooks. Like Scott Simon, Geraldine Brooks has been a war correspondent in Bosnia, as well as Somalia and the Middle East. The setting for her latest historical novel, however, is the bloodiest conflict on American soil, the Civil War.

Like Wide Sargasso Sea and Ahab’s Wife before it, March opens a window on the life of another book’s minor character: Mr. March, the patriarch of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Brooks first imagines him as young Yankee peddler in the antebellum South, where he has a brief encounter with a slave named Grace — the disastrous results of which drive home the evil of slavery and leave him tinged with guilt. When war breaks out two decades later, March leaves his family of "little women" in Concord to enlist as a chaplain. Soon, though, he finds the moral high ground pocked with evils of its own. "If ever a war can be said to be just, then this war is so ... and yet everywhere I turn, I see injustice in the waging of it," says March, having witnessed a Union commander order civilian homes and businesses burned, and soldiers harass Confederate families.

Contradictions deepen when March is reassigned to a plantation where newly freed slaves work the cotton crop for wages. Although the slaves had worked for a tyrannical master, at least he had kept them largely fed, healthy, and safe. Now they have freedom, but their liberators have made no long-term provisions for their well-being. Some even are tempted into helping Confederate rebels — a twist that has near-fatal results for the abolitionist March, and pushes his ideals to their limit.

The formal 19th-century narration of Little Women flows over March, lending its surface a lovely eloquence. Look underneath, however, and you’ll find strong currents of violence, racism, and cultural paternalism that are both ageless and unnervingly contemporary.

Nam-A-Rama (Forge, 2005), by Phillip Jennings. An unwinnable, unpopular war in a supremely hostile foreign setting turns out to be 1) a government-contractor’s bonanza; 2) a pork-barrel politician’s wet dream; and 3) a good ol’ Texas president’s opportunity to proclaim: "You see, I start the war, the hawks go apeshit, the left pisses their pants, and I sail on to a second term."

Welcome to Nam-A-Rama, first-time novelist Phillip Jennings’s hopped-up joyride through the Vietnam War, which looks a lot like Alice in Wonderland in combat boots. A pair of ace Marine helicopter pilots, Almost-Captain Gearheardt and pal Almost-Captain Armstrong, are given orders by the president (LBJ as a jowly Mad Hatter) to kill Ho Chi Minh. Or maybe to broker a peace deal with him — whichever. But first they’ll have to air-drop a 500-pound pig, fondle a fair number of prostitutes, and duck the brass. They’ll also have to figure out the real allegiances of their gunnery sergeant, a naked American movie star, and a British agent named Whiffenpoof.

The plot — which culminates in the Marines’ bonding over beer and whores with their new pals "Hoche" (Ho Chi Minh) and "Geepster" (General Giap) in Hanoi — is largely an excuse for Jennings to skewer military and political foibles (e.g., the armed services are so secretive and paranoid that a turf war breaks out in a White House bathroom between the various intelligence operatives who’ve "planted" themselves there). A former ’Nam pilot himself, Jennings also includes flashes of war — real war, the staggeringly unfunny kind — and pays tribute to the ones who must actually slog through it, both then and now.

War by Candlelight (HarperCollins, 2005), by Daniel Alarcón. A series of nine burnt matchsticks marches down the cover of Daniel Alarcón’s debut short-story collection, War by Candlelight, and it’s an incredibly apt visual metaphor. Each of these nine stories provides a dazzling but brief glimpse of Alarcón’s talent, which is informed by the natural and political upheavals in his native Peru. War in its conventional sense is not the theme here; instead, Alarcón uses both physical and emotional battlefields for his characters’ struggles.

The first story, "Flood," opens with a battle between street gangs: "We spilled into the avenue and fought like men, side by side with our fathers and brothers against their fathers and brothers. It was a carnival. My hands moved in closed fists and I was in awe of them.... We were blind with happiness." The boyish exuberant violence of throwing rocks and swinging bats is answered at the end with a picture of terrucos rioting at a prison, executing guards and throwing their bodies from the tower, before government forces put a final, shocking end to it.

Standouts in the collection include "City of Clowns," in which a grown son wrestles with his father’s ghost; the doomed romance "Third Avenue Suicide"; and the two stories tied most closely to Peru’s volatile history, "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979," and the title story, "War by Candlelight," a mosaic of events in the life of a rebel leader. However, readers will find memorable passages, brutal and lovely, throughout War by Candlelight, as the characters do battle with themselves, each other, and the world.

J.L. Johnson can be reached at jenn1087@yahoo.com