cover image The Aardvark is Ready for War

The Aardvark is Ready for War

James W. Blinn. Little Brown and Company, $22.45 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-316-09987-5

This rambling satire of Navy life during the Gulf War follows ""the Aardvark"" (a video-addicted specialist in decoding submarine traces) and his aircraft-carrier crewmates en route from California to the Persian Gulf. Blinn splices the nervous tedium of ship life with drunken shore-leave antics in Hawaii and the Philippines, poking fun along the way at boneheads of several stripes: patriotic yahoos, stuffed-shirt officers and (oddly enough, in a navy satire) ""overeducated"" feminist civilians. Near the crew's destination--and the end of the novel--a crime is committed, fatal accidents ensue and the Aardvark finally understands what war at sea is all about. For all its intellectual pretensions (beginning with an epigraph by Jean ""The-Gulf-War-Did-Not-Take-Place"" Baudrillard), this Pacific log is minor stuff. Lacking the truly horrified sensibilities of Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22 (to which the publishers compare the novel), Blinn's hyper, pseudo-Pynchonesque prose substitutes tired gags (shipboard food, naval lust) and a technophobia so half-baked it could be spouted by Beavis and Butt-head. What really sinks the story, however, is the Ardvark himself, a frat-boy-as-narrator who may echo the cynicism and fears of real-life sailors-in-arms but will tire other readers long before his maritime misadventures reach their punchline of death. (May)