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Without quite knowing it, we are now deep into the era of the post-post-9/11 novel.
LikeCherry, these are novels with scenarios that run to extremes, but they are invented extremes.
Markley is a hoarder of spectacular and gruesome incidents.
Those are the books more gothic elements.
Formally,Ohiois an ensemble melodrama: I often found myself thinking of it asOhio, Actually.
The blend of the banal, the generic, and the outrageous is awkward, to put it politely.
Only the highway was a cool river of water through which he could be assured safe passage.
The rest of it burned like blood on fire.
This overwriting a little bit Hendrix and a little bit Tom Wolfe is characteristic of Markleys bombastic mode.
Iraq War veteran Dan Eaton often thinks of life in terms of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
One of his buddies in Iraq is an Alanis Morissette fanatic.
Much of his war material is stagey and inauthentic.
A similar paradox plagues the novel as a whole.
He knows the territory intimately and adds a layer of cogent if broadly familiar Rust Belt sociology.
In style as well as content, the result is overstuffed and often ludicrous.
They are the nurses on board, who lose another, much less severely wounded casualty on the way.
This lends him both a personal stake in the story and a convenient omniscience.
What sensations will he have on the way?
Theres quantified brain damage, blinking eyes and blank stares, a heart attack.
Edens life is life in name only.
This aspect of the story might be more gripping if Ackermans characterizations werent so deliberately thin.
He held it all down, too.
As for Mary, shes beautiful and she wants a baby.
With Eden suffering from something like PTSD-induced impotence, cue the adultery plot, a soap opera without bubbles.
Two more casualties in the war to outdo American reality.
