REDEPLOYMENT

            My god is Redeployment good. The debut fiction from Phil Klay is as dazzling a collection of stories as you’re likely to come across anytime soon (even acknowledging its very few weaknesses [when will 3rd-person stories return?]). Here’s what’s got to be insanely frustrating for Mr Klay: he’s written just a tremendous collection of stories which, yes, are centered around war (specifically Iraq), but because of the way folks talk about war writing (particularly fiction), he’s all but guaranteed to find a certain small collection of books mentioned again and again along with his own collection (as comparisons, as books his own book takes its place among or whatever reviewerish phrase is used, etc.), and the title most likely to be most referenced is, of course, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I teach parts of that collection with some frequency, so I’m not gonna here engage it other than to note the obvious: it’s good and lasting literature, certainly, and should be read by lots, etc.

HOWEVER. However. Mr Klay actually deserves much, much more than reviews which merely situate his collection in any lineage. Even reaching back (as Swofford does, in his blurb) to Tolstoy and Carver and Beattie, or (as Carpenter does, in her blurd) to Conrad, Herr, and Hemingway, is a bit…not too much, and not any stretch, just not it. I don’t even know whom to compare Klay to—you can find stylistic touchstones, certainly, but on the whole the language is steady, direct and touched by searching, but then there are also these depth charges of acuity and emotion that Klay drops that just about knock you out of your chair. For instance, you’re reading about  a guy (a Marine vet) going to law school at NYU and trying to figure out what to do with his life, and then there’s a line like this: “With them I’d reverted back to college, cracking dirty jokes and telling drunk stories, so when I sat down at my computer, I think I wanted to recover whatever it is that I am when I look at tht names of the dead.” That’s from “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,” one of the collection’s later stories, but all of them contain such grace and strange might and majesty at both a sentence and idea level.

In the first and title story (which begins with the speed and softness you’ll come to expect from the whole book: “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.”), a vet returning from Iraq has to deal with his aging, declining, needs-to-be-put-down dog. It’s a terrible story—it is, like the first half-dozen stories in Redeployment, gutting and tough in the way it attempts not to solve or cure the various hurts of anyone but instead tries to just account for them, tries to acknowledge their numbers. The first half of the book’s largely like this: it features stuff closer to combat than the stories at the book’s back half, with a focus on either the acts of war or the bureaucracy and business of war (there are at least two stories [one of which: here] that are nearly, awesomely, destabilizing just for their alphabet-soupness, they’re like free jazz with military acronyms). The second half of the book—maybe last two-thirds, honestly—feature longer stories which try to track the distanter reaches of war: these stories are about the war that’s lived once away from the war, the one that tattoos these young men’s lives.

One could mount a strong (and, I’d argue, successful) argument that Redeployment‘s center’s got something to do with belief, with searching. Not, necessarily, just for stuff like meaning (though there is that, in the absolutely shattering “Prayer in the Furnace,” which is narrated by a chaplain and which is the story that comes closest to being blatantly open about any what the fuck’s the meaning of everything impulse), but also for stuff like context, purpose, utility (this is where Tolstoy comes in, to a degree). Immediately after “Prayer in the Furnace,” there’s another story, “Psychological Operations,” a story which features a vet (who happens to be Egyptian) and a black Muslim woman in something like the absolutely worst imaginable scenario: the story’s set in motion by a political correctness-type thing at Amherst College. I will 100% admit it: I began the story almost fearing the thing, what it’d become: seriously? Some this-is-our-culture, that’s-yours, let’s-work-it-out story? And yet, of course, it’s not remotely that: the story (which, along with “Prayer,” which immediately precedes it, account for nearly 120 pages in a ~290 page book, so it’s not like they’re incidental or not worth considering as the book’s centerpieces) is a mindblower of not-knowing, of not getting there. “Maybe we’ll talk another time,” the woman says near story’s end, but you know they won’t.

I could go on and on but won’t. Look, this thing is the realest real deal, and certainly the best story collection of 2014 so far, and maybe last year as well. Hard to know. It’s impossible for me at present to imagine a future in which the work of Phil Klay isn’t significant to everyone who cares about words or narrative or meaning. The book drops next week (3/3). Order it now and hope it ships early.