Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Review of The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers


So many good reviews have been written about this book is that I was puzzled to find it lacking in many ways.
 
It’s a first novel written by a young poet, and it contains many of the elements of good poetry:  archetypes, vivid metaphors, wrenching themes, alternating stanzas that lead us eventually to a final reveal, and a strong central voice.  But for those reasons, it doesn’t quite hold together as a novel.  Archetypes, when used in a longer narrative format, quickly become uninteresting stereotypes—for example Sterling, the hard-bitten sergeant whom everyone agrees is the perfect soldier.  And we never get attached to the younger soldier that the narrator has promised to protect (conveniently named Murph, as if he were a cute, stuffed toy unable to hold his stitching intact in a hostile environment).
 
So instead the book becomes an exploration of the soul of its narrator, and succeeds on that level.  Its poetry reminds us that the young men we send into war are not machines, not the brutal automatons that the army wants them to be, but young people full of life and the urge to experience beauty and a sense of purpose.  As the narrator says of himself and Murph while they’re getting ready to be deployed: “Being from a place where a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life, causes a unique kind of shame.  We’d had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.  So we’d come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be.”
 
But a novel is not just the poetry of its language and the insights of one narrative voice.  And sometimes the metaphors in this book stretch to the breaking point and beyond, as when the narrator struggles for an image to describe what it’s like to fly home as one of the survivors of a pointless war.  His words are buffeted by so much turbulence that the reader eventually loses the sense of what he’s saying or what the character is thinking.
 
And we never get a sense of the day-to-day routine of deployment in Iraq.  Amongst all the lovely metaphor, the book is strangely lacking in description.  I felt that less poetry and more straightforward narration would have served the story better.  Fortunately, the novel is short in length so that the reader isn’t asked to stay involved with the characters too long.  And the disjointed narration lends truth to its overall message, presented as a sudden insight the narrator has after going AWOL in Germany:  “I realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what was true.  And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which.”
 
I can’t say I liked “The Yellow Birds” as much I expected to.  And I find the high praise that critics and other writers have given it to be more an expression of their guilt over not condemning a war that was obviously unnecessary from the beginning, than a clear-eyed look at the qualities of the book itself.  Nevertheless, I think everyone should read it in spite of its flaws, and take the opportunity to get inside a mind that’s been battered and torn by war.
 

1 comment:

  1. He is a poet - his writing is so lyrical, descriptive. I found myself rereading paragraphs just to soak it all in. I like the way he tells this very difficult story, moving back and forth between the war and coming home. Most of us can never know how this war felt to those who experienced it, and it's hard to take a clear, straight look at the war's effects on soldiers. He does a great job of conveying that in an almost heartbreaking narrative.

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