Mo' Books: The Yellow Birds

I admit when I hear a film or novel being over-hyped by popular media, flags go up in my mind. I guess I am becoming quite cynical when encountering the newest, bestest thing in the whole wide world: it usually isn’t.

This slim novel by Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers certainly has drawn a lot of attention: gushing reviews notably from the New York Times, selected as the community read for East Lansing (no doubt as a result of such reviews) and the first read of the new season of C’s book club. Coming on the heels of the Beasts of the Southern Wild debacle, hearing about all this piqued my curiosity. With severe reservations.

The Yellow Birds is not a bad book but it is not very good book either. It is certainly not THE GREAT AMERICAN WAR NOVEL OF THE IRAQ ERA  or “The All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab Wars” as Tom Wolfe inexplicably chirps on the book cover. Oh please. I doubt if most of this generation has heard of All Quiet still less read it.

It's helpful for readers to bear in mind concerning the author: he is a newly minted MFA, this is his first book and he is a Poet with a capital P.

The book opens with an epigraph that explains the title: it’s from a violence and obscene-themed army marching cadence. A nice, big fat metaphor even before the first sentence. Oh dear-amateur hour? I am of two minds concerning epigraphs. They can be helpful in certain circumstances for the author but they can also seem an incredibly pretentious device. Especially when used by a rookie author. Sigh.

To be fair, Kevin Powers has some ability and has an acute eye for detail. Unfortunately, he does so to distraction. There seems to be few adjectives he has met that he didn’t like. His prose is described by many as lyrical. A bit much to my taste. His constant use of inner reflections could have been toned down a bit. His fatal choice of a post-modern, fractured, non-linear story line doesn’t do the book any favors either. The Times disagrees: “…..the fractured structure replicates the book’s themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands — the nonlinear design of Powers’s novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesn’t just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards”. Well, read it for yourself. I guess the metaphor of slogging through Power's endless meanderings does match a 2 day march in the sand.

As I read the book, I thought often of Terrence Malick’s 1998 adaptation of James Jones's The Thin Red Line. Set in Guadalcanal during WWII, it’s considered one of the most lyrical war movies ever made. And a bit out there. The most prominent features in the film are two of Malick’s principal devices: shots of wind moving in grass and metaphysical voice overs of the protagonist. To parody: Why are we here? What are we doing? Who is that man on that hill? Why does he want to kill me? Yeah, Yellow Birds is chock full of this sort of thing.

This book is also a kit bag filled with well-worn war clichés-the naïf who has a breakdown, the weary, brutal, cynical yet caring sergeant, clueless and gung ho officers, a misguided promise to a mother, a pretty female medic who dies, the boy to man arc of the narrator, the inevitable abuse of alcohol and general disconnection with society when he first returns home, finally finding solace in an isolated cabin in the mountains. Yepper, no new ground broken here. Powers stands on the broad shoulders of Hemingway, Michener, Mailer, Joyce and many others. No new insights into the universe of battle either, despite the author’s attention to minutiae.

Worse, all the distractions of the post-modern style, inner musings and overwrought adjectives end up committing the mortal sin for a war novel: it becomes boring. The author early on alludes to the ending but these distractions sap any suspense or tension in building up to the climax. Meanwhile, one doesn’t become invested enough to care about the characters at all. They're too conventional, familiar. Curiously, you don't learn why the narrator goes to war in the first place. Finally at the reveal, which if written differently could have had great emotional resonance, my reaction was muted: “oh, so that’s what happened” instead of: “whoa!”

I could have wished the author had written the book and shelved it for a few years. Let it age and let himself mature both as a person and a writer. Get a few books under his belt and then return to this. Perhaps tell the tale in a more traditional form. Turn the massive inner dialogues into a separate book as a meditation on the combat experience. Leave the adjectives to workshop exercises. Restrain the lyrical prose and use it sparingly for the greatest impact and therefore becoming more memorable.

In the end, I come away wondering what pushed the hype for this book? Was it trying to fill a dearth of literature about the wars? As I have noted in an earlier blog, there has been little music to come out of these 10+ years of conflict. A few books have been written but considering the number of people who cycled in and out of there over the last decade, you would think more folks would have something to say. C blames it on technology: the “say it and forget about it”  tweets, emails, occasional blogs. She suspects there has not been a whole lot of diary-keeping in the traditional sense. Thoughts that are put down in the moment, reflected upon later and ultimately ending up as a book. 

The Yellow Birds does not have much to say about the Iraq war itself. What happens is pretty generic for all wars if you think about it. Perhaps that’s the unintended message: we keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same results. We learn nothing and forget everything.