Articles Article

Writer and Denver resident Nick Arvin gets a nice notice for his first novel, Articles of War, in the Washington Post:

Articles of War (Doubleday, $17) is a gem of a book about a horrific subject. First-time novelist Nick Arvin describes how it feels to be a naive 18-year-old sent off to fight in a brutal war.

George Tilson, called Heck because he never swears (a promise he made to his late mother back in Iowa), lands at Omaha Beach in 1944. While waiting to be deployed, he wanders away from camp and gets briefly involved with Claire, a teenage French girl. Heck doesn't handle their liaison all that well, fumbling and backtracking in his reticent way.

Then suddenly he's at the front, battered by artillery in a harrowing scene Arvin evokes in perfect, riveting pitch. "The noise was like nothing he had ever experienced before, a noise such as might be used to herald the beginning of a terrible new world, and now, as he was bodily shaken and thrown by this wracking of the earth, there was no time, no memory, no future, no self, no control or sense beyond fear."

He also gets a blurb-ready description of the book as "beautifully written and timely."

YPTR has a copy of Articles but hasn't gotten around to reading it yet.  (They just keep publishing the damn things with no thought to my now tragi-comically large TBR pile.)  Nonetheless, there should be more comment to come as the situation develops.