Reviews in the News: Two WWII Novels

by Judi Baxter, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 3/2/2005

World War II provides the backdrop for these novels, both brilliantly illuminating the madness of war and the incredible strength of the human spirit.

"Maybe more novelists should study engineering," begins Bob Mizesheimer's review in USA Today. "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."

Articles of War (Doubleday, $17) is the story of George Tilson, an 18-year old innocent from Iowa who is plunged into combat in Europe during the waning days of World War II. George, nicknamed Heck because of a promise to his mom not to swear, begins doubting himself almost immediately after arriving in Normandy shortly after D-Day.

Arvin writes: "He felt woefully young... [his] future was obscured by an enormous darkness, and his meager imagination felt like a pathetically small stick to poke into it."

Heck is consumed, confused and even annoyed by his fear: "It felt now like an object, exactly as if someone had cut him open, stuffed the thing inside, and sewn the flesh closed again."

Arvin captures the chaos, confusion, noise and smells of combat, something often left out of battle accounts, whether fact or fiction.

"Arvin packs a lot into 178 pages... [he] 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."

A "small by memorable novel," concludes Minzesheimer.

Like many young men in the 1940s, Tony Parker escapes a dysfunctional family by lying about his age and enlisting in the Army. After three months of basic training and a short furlough home, he finds himself on a troop ship bound for Europe. There, he becomes part of Germany's last ditch effort--the Battle of the Bulge.

World War II veteran Donn Pearce, author and screenwriter of the bestselling Cool Hand Luke, has penned Nobody Comes Back: A Novel of the Battle of the Bulge (Forge Books, $23.95). The book is being compared to Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage.

"It is through the war that Parker, like Crane's Henry Fleming, comes of age and discovers that as inhuman as war is, one's humanity need not be sacrificed to it, even as both sides--German and American alike--commit unspeakable brutalities," writes William Endicott in the Sacramento Bee.

Parker's life is revealed in a series of dreamlike flashbacks and as he is thrown into positions of leadership, his keen intellect and innate compassion enable him to come through for his men.

Endicott concludes by saying, Pearce "captures the confusion of battle in all its gritting detail in Nobody Comes Back, much as Cool Hand Luke captured the horrors of the chain gang. Both are unvarnished tales of survival, told with considerable passion by a writer who has a unique gift for storytelling."