As I rummaged through my pockets for money, a sound like wood planks slapping together broke the peace. Then again. My heart jumped up and my feet jumped back, unprepared for fired rounds.
– Matt Gallagher, Youngblood
Here’s a heartfelt book recommendation, and one I hope you’ll act on: Matt Gallagher’s novel Youngblood, out this month from Atria, pulls off many things all at once, announcing a major new talent worth keeping an eye on, showing that a blogger can move on to novel-writing and demonstrate he more than belongs, and also serving as a waking-nightmare reminder of the doomed U.S. war in Iraq.
In writing fiction, one good way to keep yourself on track is to keep in mind the need to give readers a feeling of being in a dream, one from which they do not want to wake, and tugging them forward over the course of the book without needlessly jolting them out of their state of reverie. Gallagher’s dynamite novel takes that notion and runs with it.
Gallagher does not just succeed at pulling you into a dream state, he drags you along through the equivalent of a feverish night of squirming and sweating in the thrall of a series of painfully vivid visions, wanting to splash water on your face to snap out of it but unable to do anything but keep reading. He’s our new Tim O’Brien, so far as I’m concerned, giving fresh voice to the Iraq war experience in a way that is alive and forward-moving and haunting.
For some the book might be challenging – you have to go all in, no room here for emotional distance – but I urge you to check this one out, sooner rather than later. I find it exciting that a graceful, wise-beyond-his-years novelist should have emerged, fully formed, from a background as a U.S. Army Captain blogging from Iraq. Blogs can indeed be a springboard to touch-all-the-corners mastery of the novel. Who would have guessed it?
We’ll be talking to author Matt Gallagher for the WCR Interview some month soon, so if you read the book and have questions, let us know. Reading the book, I felt (rightly or wrongly) as if I could hear a wide variety of influences, from Tom Berenger’s bad-sergeant portrayal in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” to great O’Brien novels like The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato. I felt, again rightly or wrongly, as if I could see the novel’s growth from work done as an MFA student at Columbia, in a few clumps here and there that feel like they’re part of another book, to a joyous rush that gave me the sense, as a fellow writer, of a book being written with a strong wind at the back.
The book is disturbing, from the moral lessons it draws to the specific details of our misguided foray into Iraq (you might have thought you were safe from ever again hearing about “The Surge,” but it pops up here repeatedly). I don’t know if it’s been optioned yet, but it could make a good movie, because it is a story about much more than war and its follies. It’s a story about people struggling not to hurt each other, struggling to understand themselves and others, struggling to find their way.
– Steve Kettmann
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