EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Peaceby Richard Bausch, Tuskar Rock, 171pp. £12.99
IT ALL SEEMS so straightforward, an unhappy reconnaissance party of US soldiers battling the rain, “somewhere near Cassino, but it was hard to believe it was even Italy anymore. They had stumbled blind into some province of drenching cold, a berg of death. Everything was in question now.”
The Italians have lost interest, while the Germans are in retreat. Bausch quickly conveys the feeling of anticlimax – the US soldiers may be on the winning side, but they are equally defeated, weary and cold, and waiting to die. “The muscles of their legs burned and shuddered, and none of them could get enough air.”
One of the soldiers, Robert Marson, who is a few years older than the others, married with a child, feels at least he has had some kind of a life, is alert and thinks about how they are all witnesses, “and nobody could look anybody in the eye”. Marson’s heel is sore, and he is “sick to his soul”.
Something horrible has happened, something beyond the routine depravity of war. This event has upset the soldiers. It is preying on their minds. The previous day a cart hauled by a donkey and driven by two young Italian boys had struggled into view. Concealed beneath the load of straw were a German soldier and a woman. The German kills two of the Americans before he is shot. The woman, a girl, shouts abuse at the soldiers. Sergeant Glick checks the two American soldiers, walks over to the girl and shoots her in the head.
The men are appalled. “For a few seconds, no one said anything. They all stood silent and did not look at one another, or at Glick, and the only sound was the rain.” It is a remarkable scene: the soldiers, who have seen so much, unable to absorb the prevailing horror of their sergeant’s action. Marson, having killed the German, can’t stop thinking of the dying man, who had looked at him “with an expression terrifyingly like wonder, while the light or the animation or whatever it was left his green eyes . . . ”. All of this in only the first chapter.
Much of the narrative unfolds through the shocked consciousness of Marson, who is disturbed by his own act, but even more revolted by Glick’s vicious killing of the girl. Although the soldiers bicker among themselves, they are all disgusted by Glick.
Bausch builds the tension. One of the men, Joyner, feels swear words must feature in every sentence he speaks. He is also free with racial abuse. They have all been unsettled by the killing. Glick orders some of the men to climb a mountain. Is he deliberately trying to separate his witnesses? Glick does not appear to think he has committed a wrong, although he is later heard saying she was killed in cross-fire. The hill group, which includes Marson, sets off, led by a stoic old Italian who finds himself recruited as their guide.
Exactly how good is the finest of contemporary US fiction? Very. Outstanding, judging by the publication of work as superb as this edgy short novel by the gifted and still seriously unsung Richard Bausch. Bausch has been widely anthologised in the US, published in the journals that matter, from the New Yorkerto the Atlantic Monthly, and celebrated by fellow writers of the stature of Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. As long ago as 1995, a firecracker introductory collection, Aren't You Happy For Me?, was published in the UK, thrilling critics, who decided they had discovered yet another new American literary messiah. But that was it, and Bausch appeared to return, at least as far as Europeans readers were concerned, to that literary underground inhabited by a surprising number of US writers, including Denis Johnson and William Gay.
Peace is a classic war story. Bausch creates a group of men who are terrified of dying but also resigned to it. There are shades of Wolff and Robert Olmstead. The dialogue is well handled, as is the characterisation, but in Marson, Bausch has a sympathetic central character who is caught up in an intense moral dilemma. As the men fear a sniper’s shot, their individual resentments surface. Yet all the while it is the murder of the young prostitute that stalks their every moment. The presence of the old Italian also causes friction. He and Marson communicate through a strange blend of Marson’s half-forgotten snatches of Italian and the old man’s fragmented English. Joyner never trusts the old man, believing him to understand more English than they think.
You can feel the rain, smell the defeat of the soldiers as the rain turns to snow. A doe picks through the wet forest, oblivious to the terror the sound of her approach causes the soldiers. Every tree may be concealing the enemy.
It is a slightly different setting for Bausch. His natural territory is the ordinary – the slightly modified ordinary. He is particularly good on men and women, achieving a type of rugged Updike crossed with Carver. In one of Bausch's stories, The Fireman's Wife, a woman thinks of her father-in-law, who reminds her of "those pictures of hungry, bewildered men in the Dust Bowl thirties – with their sad, straight combed hair and their desperation."
ALTHOUGH PEACEIS dramatic and suspenseful, with a twist that opts for the unexpected, Bausch can also be very funny. In the dialogue-driven title story from Aren't You Happy for Me?, a father is informed by his daughter that she intends to marry an older man. "Jesus," announces the exasperated father, "I mean he's older than I am, kid. He's – he's a lot older than I am . . . Honey, nineteen years. When he was my age, I was only two years older than you are now." When the two-way telephone conversation becomes a three-hander, with the aged suitor joining in, the father shouts: "You're too old for my wife, for Christ's sake." It is sharp, snappy comedy that is also true to Bausch's reflective style. Resigned to her daughter's decision, the girl's mother remarks: "Who knows, maybe they'll be happy for a time."
In another story in that collection a husband, in the silence following an argument, glances over at his wife on the way home, noting “the unpleasant downturn of her mouth, the chiselled, too sharp curve of her jaw – the whole dishevelled, vaguely tattered look of her – as though he were a stranger, someone unable to imagine what anyone, another man, other men, sometime like himself, could see in her to love.”
That same resigned detachment is evident in the powerful characterisation of the old Italian. “It seemed to Marson that he had the demeanour of someone who had no fear for himself anymore. He seemed almost detached. It was disturbing . . . ” There is a cat-and-mouse quality: hunted and hunter.
Peaceis a great story; a great war story. It is a study of people caught in an unknown that is also inevitable. Think of Wolff's The Hunters in the Snowor The Barracks Thief. It's about time everyone discovered the sure-footed, humane and very real genius of Richard Bausch.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times