Victor Vazquez: The first and titular story in Phil Klay’s Redeployment is a 16-page, good old-fashioned, classic American, Old Yeller/Of Mice and Men/“man’s gotta do” dog-killing story mashed up with a rough-and-tumble, spartan, Tim O’Brien-ed-out, quasi-emo war tale. It’s a quick and easy read and I would have found the gruff, unpretentious style to be charming, and even strangely “fun” if the story didn’t essentially ask the reader to feel more emotion for the death of a dog than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi humans—a million by some counts, and around 120,000 of them civilians—who have died since the US’s brutal and illegitimate invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez is a post-American Neo-Mestizo post-Pop artist from the Bay Area working primarily with language, light, sound, people, and the internet. His debut novel O.K. is forthcoming from Sorry House. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.”

A few people I grew up with are in the military and I know them to be basically good or at least well-meaning people, but with politics that are more or less fundamentally different from mine. Their worldview is something to the effect of “War is a dirty job but somebody has to do it,” and mine is more along the lines of “War is a dirty job and nobody has to do it.” I understand that my opinion probably comes off as idealistic and naive to them. Their opinion comes off as misguided, regurgitated, uncreative, and defeatist to me.

The United States’s defense budget is larger than those of the next five largest militaries combined. In the last half century or so the US military has killed more than nine million people on record in over 200 incursions and 20 separate wars globally. It has illegally imprisoned, tortured, and raped. It is a force of global imperialism pretty much unprecedented in human history, and to be a soldier in that army and write a book with the opening line “We shot dogs,” is, in my opinion, not the classiest look. I understand the intention may have been to be “edgy,” confrontational, ugly like how war is ugly, but I already know war is ugly, and I just don’t feel like musings about America’s military action abroad are best led with a dog-killing metaphor.

There’s some interesting enough stuff going on stylistically in the collection. “OIF” is a story about survivor’s guilt told using a cute one-note gimmick: inserting as many military acronyms as possible, a trick that can read alternately as a postmodern tip of the helmet to DFW and/or Klay parodying his own jargon-heavy style, typical of war writing. If anything, he’s self-aware. In “Money as a Weapons System” (probably the best title in the collection, though “In Vietnam They Had Whores” is a pretty crazy one too), the protagonist worries that’s he’s “a fraud and a war tourist,” which is a pretty sensitive moment, I guess. There’s no shortage of dark wit, dry observational humor, unadorned pathos, etc., and I think I can see and even in a context-free vacuum appreciate what he’s doing most of the time; I have no issue with Klay’s skill as a writer. I guess my problem is with war writing as a genre. I think the polite thing to say is that “I’m not the reader” for it.

And still, I understand the significance and need for the voice of the soldier and the veteran in literature, culture, etc. Many of these people have seen up close pretty much the ugliest of humanity and they have a lot of existential wisdom for it. I will say, however, that there’s definitely no shortage of those narratives in America’s mass mythology. We have been inundated with these narratives since we were kids, not just in history and literature classes in school but on TV, and in movies and video games. As beautifully wrought and subtle and nuanced as some of these tales can be, they still largely tend to serve the function of propaganda, regardless of the author’s intention. Even in condemning war, they end up romanticizing, glorifying, and legitimizing it on some level (often on many levels) and are added to a giant heap of stories that do the same.

Years back I ran into an old friend from high school on the bus. I hadn’t seen him since he’d left for Iraq and he had been back for a year or so. He was working at Nordstrom as a security guard and he was carrying a picture frame with slots for 16 individual photos. He told me, “When I counted and saw there was 16 spaces on the frame I knew I had to get it to frame my 16 kills.” Apparently he’d taken pictures of each Iraqi he shot. Over the course of the bus ride he told me he was on medication for PTSD and had insomnia, paranoia, and frequent nightmares. I didn’t really know how to tell him that I thought that framing his kills was probably not the best way to deal with that, and I ended up not saying anything and just was like, “OK, man, take care, dude,” when I got off at my stop.

I feel more or less the same way regarding Redeployment: compelling yet repulsive, ultimately leaving me ambivalent.

Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. It’s the third book in her Neapolitan trilogy and I hadn’t read the first two so it took a few chapters of flipping to the index to see who was who and what was what before I had my bearings. But once I caught my stride I was hooked. She writes with an intensely sensitive attention to emotional detail, an unforgiving honesty about class, and a masterful knack for weaving the political seamlessly with the personal.

The overarching story centers around a post-World War II ghetto of Naples—not sure where exactly, Ferrante seems to only refer to it as “the neighborhood“—over the course of roughly half a century. It follows the narrator Elena, who leaves—kind of: She goes off to school in Pisa, publishes a book, gets engaged, and in this book returns to stay with her family before moving to Florence with her fiancé—and Raffaela, usually referred to as Lina or Lila, who stays—kind of: She marries the grocery store manager, leaves him for another dude, and when that dude knocks up this other chick she leaves him to go live with this other dude in the suburbs of Naples, which is where we find her in this book. Regardless, the point more or less is that Elena’s on this sort of aspirational, upward trajectory, mingling in academic and literary circles, while Lila stays local, works at the grocery store and then at a sausage factory, and they’re both swept up, somewhat reluctantly, into the communist/anti-fascist student movement of the time, Elena as an intellectual and Lila as a worker.

But the book resists and at times dissolves the easy classifications and cut-and-dry shorthand I just employed to try to sum it up. You can’t clearly say that Elena is squarely an intellectual and Lila is squarely a worker. They’re close friends who both come from poverty and both possess intellect and both perform labor of sorts, and in the minutiae of their relationship you see how these larger ideas play out on a human level, all through the organically feminist lens of the deep spiritual connection between these two women who, in two distinctly different ways, are seeking freedom from the strictures of society as a whole, from the expectations (and lack thereof) of their neighborhood and the pressures of various men and women in their lives that insist they behave this or that way. It’s a real constellational soap opera of ideas.

So yeah, in conclusion, I wasn’t mad at the style of Redeployment but also wasn’t really feeling it as a book. And Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is basically a flawless piece of literature and the clear winner.