Page 27 July–August 2008 Skin-and-Bone Language John Domini The Farther Shore Matthew Eck Milkweed Editions http://www.milkweed.org 192 pages; cloth, $22.00 The combat soldier, seeking words to frame his experience, doesn’t know where to begin. In Matthew Eck’s debut novel, nearly all of which takes place behind enemy lines, one frazzled infantryman gives voice to despair: “We made a mess of this whole thing…I’m sick with it.”Yet a few pages before that, in the sort of apposition that haunts this strobe-lit The Farther Shore, another trooper turns the experience carefree: “Clip put a hand on my shoulder. ‘…What happens here stays here, right?’‘Sure,’I said. It made this whole thing sound like a vacation.” “This whole thing”: a pit and yet a lark, an inferno that—Eck shows us this as well—every once in a while turns up an angel. Extremes like that, intrinsic to the wary business of gun and helmet, would seem a natural fit for the novel form. Doesn’t William H. Gass, cheerfully smashing icons in his essay “The Nature of Narrative,” demonstrate by vivid example how story depends on oppositional patterns? On force and counterforce, the more Grimm-like and bloody the better? Then why hasn’t our armed-to-the-teeth America come up with any decent war novels since the great work out of the Vietnam years? A good question, but before we get to it, I must point out that Eck’s Farther Shore is more than decent, by a long chalk. Its outline recalls Tim O’Brien’sAWOLsaga, Going After Cacciato (1978), yet this closeness to a supernova doesn’t leave the book singed. In Eck’s version, our Lost Patrol is an unlucky recon squad, first six, then five, then four…. But this author works through a narrator, creating a more intimate affect than Cacciato, whose protagonist , Paul Berlin, we experience at the remove of third person. Also, Farther Shore’s crew doesn’t make its way across mapless and mythic Eur-Asia, but rather first across a shot-up seaport, where some trucks and cars remain functional. Outside town, too, the GI’s know where they could find an American base, across the desert. To be sure, the plywood-battened storefronts of the downtown, along with the arid countryside ruled by warlords, amount to an obvious setting. It’s Mogadishu, during the fumblingAmerican intervention of the early 1990s. Not saying so runs the risk of posturing—of Eck, a veteran who served in Somalia, getting above his raising. In fact, his opening passage hammers on the generic “the city,” driving that coffinnail home. But the insistence that destruction lurks everywhere is tempered, at the outset and throughout, by obscene specificity, a soldier’s pottymouth (“the poor souls, the poor fucks in the city…”), and it lends a chill to the brand name of the squad’s support helicopters (Spectre). The war is history—and so must be the novel. Such shadows of allusion trail Eck’s wanderers . At novel’s opening, his clandestine spotters sit “watching from the rooftop of the tallest building in town,” but soon a mortal sin, rooted in aboriginal fear of the dark, topples them from this high place. Cast out, at times their wandering recalls Cain’s, and of course the title carries a churchgoer’s hopeful echo. To his credit, at novel’s close Eck makes fine, measured use of the expression, the better place towards which we hope our troubles will lead us. Inevitably, this infernal journey also suggests Dante, but this comparison raises the question of style. The Florentine was a verbal magician, plucking perfect turns of phrase from his robes. Eck will have none of that: At one point we hid in what looked to have been a great mansion. We stood among empty pots and planters…where a beautiful garden once thrived. …[W]e stopped near a fountain that was the only decoration I could see in a massive plaza…. Kids mulled about… an astonishing number…. This was a city for desolate and abandoned children. The grunt’s-eye-view allows for stark outlines only...
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Dec 1, 2012
Claire Barnabas 
Open Access