A Harrowing Tale of War, Told in One Long, Urgent Sentence

New York Times

2 days ago

ANGEL DOWN, by Daniel Kraus
And so here is 'Angel Down,' Daniel Kraus's thunderous gallop of a war novel, which begins midsentence, and mid-battle, as our hero arises inexplicably from a certain-death experience, and lies marveling at his luck, and thinks of a beautiful prostitute named Marie-Louise, and is 'distracted by the corpses packed slick hot on all sides of him,' and provides in all ways a perfect example of what the literary theorist Stanley Fish calls the additive style, in which the writer's prose is associative and spontaneous, piling up new facts and ideas without necessarily spelling out their relationships.
The additive style — as distinct from the precise and ordered subordinating style — suggests that the relationship between events, their quote-unquote 'meaning,' is as uncertain in stories as it is in life.
And where, I ask you, is meaning more uncertain than on a battlefield?
'Angel Down' is, among many things, a new classic of the additive style. Not only does it begin mid-thought — 'and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off' — but the whole thing is a single long sentence, rambling and ducking and shifting for 285 dizzying, blood-soaked, astonishing pages.
I called 'Angel Down' a 'war novel' earlier, but it is as much about the vagaries of combat as 'Moby-Dick' is a fishing manual. Yes, it is set during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I, but rather than a dry history or maudlin tale of brothers in arms, it is a stylistically delightful literary novel and a best-in-class example of speculative fiction. That speculative element is teased right there in the title: One of God's best and brightest has been knocked from heaven by war's tumult and is caught in a thatch of barbed wire. She's rescued by a detachment of American doughboys, led by the aforementioned Pvt. Cyril Bagger, an utterly cynical Midwestern con man and failed draft dodger. Bagger spends the rest of the story delivering the angel to safety, guarding her against the dangers of No Man's Land and from the predations of his fellow soldiers.
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