Red Flags by Juris Jurevics

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 20, 2011

Solid writing, intense action, strong characters, and a vividly detailed setting make Red Flags a winning hybrid of war story and espionage thriller. The book also offers a nice history lesson in some lesser known aspects of America's involvement in Vietnam.

Erik Rider, an investigator with the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, is assigned to disrupt the manufacture, transportation, and sale of drugs that are used to finance the Viet Cong. Rider travels to Cheo Reo in his undercover role as a captain, where he meets the CO -- Lt. Col. Bennett -- and a CIA agent named John Ruchevsky. After Rider finds and destroys a marijuana field, there's a price on his head, but his real goal is take out the poppy fields. That goal proves to be unpopular with people in the money chain -- people who might be closer to him than he thinks. As Rider digs more deeply into the drug trade, Ruchevsky searches for the spy who is giving classified information to the North Vietnamese. The two investigations eventually become entangled.

Rider has an interesting relationship with a female doctor -- interesting because Juris Jurevics avoids treating the reader to a clichéd combat romance. In fact, nothing about Red Flags is clichéd. The story is original, the characters genuine.

Clean, crisp, evocative prose sets this novel apart from most war thrillers. Jurevics crafts scenes of war that are poignant and heartfelt. The action scenes in Red Flags are written with adrenalin-pumping power. Although the novel moves at a brisk pace, there are only a few combat sequences. Rather, Jurjevics creates stark images of the fighting's aftermath: devastated landscapes, bloated corpses, haunted soldiers and grieving civilians. He also builds tension with anticipation: you know the shooting is coming but you don't know when. Jurjevics masterfully conveys a soldier's sense of waiting in dread, always living somewhere between boredom and terror.

As background to Rider's personal story, Red Flags captures the political complexity of Vietnam during the war era. The novel's focus on drug trafficking -- an instrument that financed both sides of the war -- isn't new, nor is its depiction of widespread corruption among the South Vietnamese leadership, but its emphasis on the role played by the Montagnard is something I haven't seen in other Vietnam fiction. Jurjevics manages to explain the conflicts between the different political, ethnic, and religious factions in South Vietnam without slowing the novel's pace.

The plot is well constructed and a critical event near the novel's end, although foreshadowed in the prologue, comes as a shock. The novel doesn't have a happy ending but neither did the war. The ending is nonetheless satisfying. The story as a whole conveys a feeling of reality seldom found in the shallow tales of heroism that too often characterize military fiction. This is one of the best military espionage thrillers I've encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Spurious by Lars Iyer

Published by Melville House on January 25, 2011

If it weren't so funny, Spurious would be insanely depressing. W. and the novel's narrator, Lars, both know that, lacking the genius of Kafka, they will amount to nothing. They have been destroyed by literature; it has made them "vague and full of pathos." They are equally unskilled as philosophers. They would like to be intellectuals but they suffer from a deficiency of intellect. Drinking their way through Europe, they are overwhelmed by history that magnifies their own insignificance. A double suicide seems to be in order, but the logistics of accomplishing that task are beyond them. Yet even their deaths would be pointless because they are inconsequential parts of larger structure, easily replaced by others of no greater importance.

Paradoxically, the gloomy friends describe themselves as "joyful." They tell themselves that they are content with their idiocy. They are "celebrants of rivers"; a view of the sea from a passing train while holding cups full of gin is their definition of happiness. Contradiction is a constant in their lives; they never seem to be bothered by (or even to notice) their inconsistency. W. strives to puzzle out the meanings of primary sources written in languages he doesn't understand and to decipher mathematical concepts that are well beyond him. That he gains nothing productive from these efforts does not deter him; he is certain that his life will be spent in continual amazement at his utter lack of ability. Lars, on the other hand, is a capable administrator; he feels the need to earn a living, for which W. frequently belittles him. In fact, Lars is the constant recipient of W.'s insults (W. regards verbal abuse as "a sign of love"): Lars is (according to W.) obese, stupid, lazy, untalented, ill-mannered, incapable of love, and without any fashion sense.

The story careens between the philosophical and the frivolous (as when W. tries to persuade Lars that a "man bag" is preferable to a rucksack). One moment W. and Lars are discussing the relationship between God and mathematics, the next they're pondering the causes of the incurable dampness in Lars' flat or the merits of living in Canada, where residents presumably carry "bear-frightening devices" in their vehicles. There is a zany intelligence, an absurdist wit at work here (in that sense, Spurious reminded me of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). Lars Iyer takes two characters who are lost in existential angst -- indifferent to their fates, deliberately living meaningless lives, convinced they are powerless to change the hopelessness and suffering that surrounds them -- and exposes their vapid, self-indulgent natures. Iyer's satirical take on intellectualism is spot on. Anyone acquainted with a "serious thinker" who takes his or her thinking too seriously will smile with recognition while reading Spurious.

At the same time, intermingled with the silliness are bits of genuine philosophy, deep thought disguised as idle chatter. The book demands a second reading just to sift out the sense from the nonsense, assuming it's possible to tell one from the other. As W. moans, he can never be sure whether he is "at the summit of his creativity or the peak of his idiocy."

This isn't a book for readers who can't abide stories that have no plot. This is a novel of comedic conversation, an examination of two friends who travel together, who gaze at the sea and mull over their lives, confess their shortcomings, debate the meaning of friendship, discuss obscure filmmakers, mourn or welcome (depending on their mood) the coming apocalypse, and accomplish nothing. If you can appreciate the humor in that, and don't mind that nothing of consequence happens to the two characters, you'll probably enjoy Spurious. It's fresh, it's original, it's insightful, and above all, it's hilarious.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Shadows of Berlin by Trevor Scott

Published by Dorchester on March 1, 2012

The cold war warms up in this reasonably entertaining spy novel.  Nick Logan is a retired CIA officer, now working as a private security consultant.  The story opens with Logan’s discharge from an Austrian hospital, having survived an assassination attempt that killed his girlfriend.  Logan soon learns that an unknown source has issued a contract on his life.  Meanwhile, five bodies, all shot through the eye, have been pulled out of the Spree River, leaving Gustav Vogler, Berlin’s chief homicide inspector, to wonder why apparently unrelated victims were targeted by a professional killer -- and leaving the reader to wonder about the connection between those killings and the attempts to murder Logan.

Apart from the dead girlfriend, three women figure into the plot.  Alexandra Schulz is a German intelligence officer to whom Logan has always felt an attraction.  Tatyana Petrova, an Army General and highly placed officer in Russia’s SVR, has a professional interest in Logan and in the growing body count in Berlin.  Logan’s ex-wife, Tina Carducci, still with the CIA, jets off to Austria to watch Logan’s back -- if she can find him.  Fortunately for her, tracking Logan isn’t difficult, given his propensity to become involved in gunfights as he makes his way across Europe. 

Trevor Scott’s writing is sometimes formulaic; his style is lackluster.  He tends to overuse certain phrases.  The novel’s several sex scenes, in particular, seem like Xerox copies of each other.  The women seem to have been cloned from a single source; there’s little to differentiate one from another.  Scott’s attempts to inject humor are mostly unsuccessful. 

On the other hand, the novel moves at the quick pace a reader expects from a thriller.  Intermittent action sequences add excitement to the story.  Although I wasn’t motivated to keep reading by stirring prose or unconventional characters, I nonetheless kept reading.  I attribute that to Scott’s ability to craft a tight plot that kept me guessing without becoming unduly convoluted.  There is, in fact, a nifty twist that brings the novel’s leading characters together for roughly the same purpose toward the novel’s end, igniting a perfect storm of intrigue.  Scott’s deft plotting largely overcomes his pedestrian writing style, making Shadows of Berlin a worthy addition to the second-tier shelf of espionage novels.

RECOMMENDED

Pulp and Paper by Josh Rolnick

Published by University Of Iowa Press on October 1, 2011

Pulp and Paper is the 2011 winner of the University of Iowa's John Simmons Short Fiction Award for a first collection of short stories. I wasn't familiar with the award until I read this book, but I have to agree that many of these stories are award-worthy.

Four stories are set in New Jersey: "Funnyboy" begins with an attention-grabbing sentence -- "I glanced out the window as my train pulled into the station and saw the girl who killed my son" -- before exploring the issues of guilt and responsibility surrounding a young boy's accidental death, a loss his father cannot accept. Loss is also at the heart of "Innkeeping," a story written from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old whose father has died and whose mother is struggling to keep their inn afloat. The first sentence -- "I wasn't looking for a new father when Tweedy walked into the bar" -- foreshadows the rest of the story.

"The Herald" is both a tribute to the old fashioned art of newspaper reporting and a personal story of a reporter on a sleepy beat who works against deadline to write an exclusive story about the fate of a missing woman. He implores his managing editor to publish the scoop, but is the story accurate? "Mainlanders" is about two boys from a small barrier island and their tongue-tied amazement that two flirtatious mainland girls visiting the beach are actually willing to talk to them. The boys learn how difficult it is to build a bridge between different worlds.

Four stories take place in (mostly upstate) New York. My favorite story in the collection, "Pulp and Paper," tells of a train crash at a paper plant and what rural neighbors will (or won't) do for each other in a time of disaster. The strain on a relationship caused by an unplanned pregnancy is at the heart of "Big River." The pregnancy forces two lovers and lifelong friends to decide whether they want to pursue something more meaningful than the lives for which they seem destined, or whether that destiny -- a marriage, a baby, a quiet town -- carries all the meaning they need.

In my second favorite story, "Big Lake," an accident on a lake kills a boy's teacher and causes her husband to lose his arm. Blaming himself for the accident, another near tragedy forces the boy to come to terms with his feelings of guilt. Set in Coney Island, "The Carousel" is a poignant story about an aging carousel operator who is lost in time.

Josh Rolnick writes with clarity and grace and gentleness. His characters are decent people living quiet lives, confronting life's difficult choices and coping with adversity as best they can. Some are adults, some are kids, but all are authentic.

Occasionally I had the sense that Rolnick was trying a little too hard to be profound, particularly when he stepped away from the story to inject a bit of philosophy. He nonetheless deserves credit for seeking a deeper meaning in common events, simple lives, and familiar experiences, a task at which he often succeeds.

RECOMMENDED

The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 6, 2011

The Artist of Disappearance consists of three long stories (billed as novellas).  Stories of this length deserve to be reviewed independently.

A young civil servant in training, stuck in the backwaters of India, must decide how to respond to a request for government support to preserve a private museum and its surprising collection of treasures.  Later in life, the man is occasionally troubled by self-doubt for reasons that the reader must intuit.  Apart from my appreciation of Anita Desai’s writing style, nothing about this story grabbed me.  “The Museum of Final Journeys” is my least favorite of the three.

In “Translator Translated,” a woman searches for her roots by relearning her childhood language and visiting the remote region where it is still spoken.  The lyrical work of a provincial writer inspires her to translate the text, but she finds its eventual publication to be less than the transformative experience she had imagined.  When the writer sends the translator a disappointing novel, the story explores the role of the translator:  should she be faithful to the original text or should she try to improve it, essentially becoming a co-author?  This is the best of the three stories.

“The Artist of Disappearance” starts as the story of a quiet life -- too quiet to be gripping.  Ravi, an adopted boy, raised to be rarely seen and never heard, becomes a reclusive adult, more comfortable in the wilderness than in the company of people.  The story gains energy when documentary makers, searching for environmental degradation, stumble upon the landscape art that Ravi has devoted himself to creating, a garden that has blossomed out of devastation.  But will Ravi’s work be desecrated if outsiders are permitted to gaze upon it?  The weak opening and a mediocre ending bracket excellent storytelling in the middle.

Anita Desai is unquestionably a fine writer.  She writes earnestly of people and their pain.  She paints characters with astonishing clarity.  For the most part, I admire her writing style, although I think she occasionally tries too hard to be eloquent, forcing words into contexts where they didn’t quite fit, sometimes indulging herself with unnecessary adverbs.  On the whole, however, her prose is a pleasure to read.

RECOMMENDED