Hi everyone!

I’ve got great news for this post. The May/June issue of the Kenyon Review, in which my short story “The Tale of the Black Worry Beads” appears, is now out. If you’d like, you can pick up an issue here. My parents bought so many copies that I doubt the magazine will be in financial trouble for a long time—but you should buy a copy too!

In other writing news. Yesterday, I submitted a short story “The Combat Cocktail” to the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Veteran’s Contest (run by the Iowa Review). The story is a satire, and pretty vulgar and unpleasant, so I can’t imagine it will win. I can’t even imagine that the judges will make it to the end of the story. My father asked me why I was submitting, if the story isn’t going to win, and I said, “To be disruptive.” We’ll see how that works out.

And now that I’m done with classes for the semester, I’m preparing to spend the summer revising my novel, Roman Sherwood. In preparation, as R.S. is a military novel, I’ve decided to spend a week immersing myself in military literature—if you can call it literature. It’s taking me longer than a week to get through the titles I selected: Soldier in the Rain, With the Old Breed, Utmost Savagery: The Three Days at Tarawa, Force Recon Diary 1969, Formation, The Red Badge of Courage, Billy Budd.

There’s a mix of genre and time period here, but I think that’s fine. I’m trying mainly to acquaint myself with the tropes of military literature so that I can use those tropes where they ought to be used, subvert them where they ought to be subverted, and find the wisdom to know the difference. So far, I’ve only finished the Soldier in the Rain, by William Goldman (author of “Princess Bride”). Soldier in the Rain was not very good.

It was easy to read—lots of dialogue, it was occasionally funny, and the characters where often in good settings or doing something active. Either they were playing golf, or they were at a carnival, or eating footlong hotdogs. Scenes are often more fun to read if the characters are active on the page and not just talking to one another in a room (although talking to one another in a room can be fine, too.)

The problem with Soldier in the Rain was, the characters didn’t feel like they needed to do anything. They just seemed to float through the action of the book, and I didn’t get the sense that we were working toward anything, or that any of the characters needed to make some emotional discovery, or that there was a point. Most of the chapters felt like episodes, or slices of life, and there wasn’t much to hold the novel together. The most meaningful moment occurred when Eustis Clay, the protagonist—if you can call him a protagonist—is thinking about life after he gets out of the army, and he has a crisis when he thinks about all the possibility available to him. He reenlists.

Now that was a great moment. Both because we see the character truly disturbed by something, and, as a result of that disturbance, he does something—reenlists—that seems to go against his character. And I, as someone who got kicked out of the military, rather than going out peacefully, I can relate to this anxiety that comes when you face the real world.

Unfortunately, that moment only occurred about 1/3 of the way through the book. It seemed to me like Eustis Clay’s decision to reenlist could have been a tragic climax of the book, rather than just an episode that didn’t seem to affect him very much after the chapter in which he made the decision. Finally, and this doesn’t really matter, but my copy was riddled with typos, including one instance where the book referred to “Clay” as “King.” Apparently, at one point the main character had a different name, and Goldman didn’t change every instance to reflect the new name. The book was written a long time ago, before the age of ctrl F, so I would forgive him, but there were enough imperfections that it just seemed to me that Goldman didn’t put a lot of care into this book. Too, there was a “he did this, then he did this,” plainness to the prose that grew stale after about a hundred pages. Fortunately, Soldier in the Rain is a short book. Verdict: Thumbs Down.