Glass: Pray the Electrons Back to Sand

In a Joycean stream-of-consciousness style, Chapman's ( Our Plague: A Film from New York ) third novel attempts to deconstruct the experience of the Persian Gulf War foot soldier. Unfortunately, his herky-jerky prose is not Joyce's and his subject--the transformation of war into television event, the brainwashing of American youth into mindless killing machines, the inherent sexism of the military--has already been enunciated much more clearly in (to name just one example) Stanley Kubrick's film, Full Metal Jacket . The opening section of the novel, which deals with the pre-Marine life of narrator VJ, is extremely difficult to trudge through. Once Chapman stops focusing on the unconvincing VJ and begins documenting the atrocity of battle in the desert, however, things improve considerably. The gruesome descriptions of death that close out the novel go straight for the stomach . Try thinking about an Iraqi soldier buried alive in sand, huddled in a fetal position 15 feet underground and treasuring his last gulp of oxygen. It's very chilling, as long as you can ignore the irritating font changes and Chapman's occasional sermonizing. (May)