REVIEWS OF THREE NEW BOOKS

[August 24th, 2005]

^MY FRIEND THE ENEMY

Prescient historical fiction argues war is too expensive for children.

By J.B. Cheaney (Alfred A. Knopf, 266 pages, $15.95)

Sixty years ago this month, America unleashed the deadliest weapon in history to end a world war. Today this country finds itself similarly embroiled in a global conflict with an enemy of a different skin color. A new young-adult novel by historical author J.B. Cheaney poignantly illustrates how life on the home front during the "Good War" differed from our consumer-age War on Terror, and why mistakes like the Japanese internment camps must never be repeated.

My Friend the Enemy is narrated by Hazel Anderson, a 12-year-old girl growing up among the apple orchards of Oregon's Hood River Valley during the fall of 1944. Three years have passed since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ruined her ninth birthday. Her father and brother have been called away to work in the war industries, her sister's fiancé has just shipped off to the Pacific with the Marines, and now she learns her neighbors are secretly harboring one of "the enemy"-an orphaned Japanese-American boy named Sogoji. Hazel finds her loyalty divided between her country and her new friend, and tension builds after a mysterious fireball appears over Mount Hood and the town is suddenly crawling with G-men.

Cheaney is a master at evoking a child's-eye view of America at war, an exciting time of scrap-metal drives, the Terry and the Pirates comic strip and junior air patrols scanning the skies for marauding Zeros. And more haunting, even, is her knack for showing how wartime propaganda-from newsreels to comic books-distorted children's perceptions of the enemy, particularly when that enemy was not merely white with a German accent, but of a different race. Striking, too, for the author's young readers are the details of the personal sacrifices everyday Americans were forced to make-recycling drives, war-bond sales, gas and food rationing-sacrifices we haven't been asked to make in the current war. We haven't even been asked to pay for it, and, as Cheaney argues in this relevant fiction, that's a job for the children. MATT BUCKINGHAM.

^NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Bare-bones gumshoe Western will make readers pine for writer's past works.

By Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95)

"What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?" That unfortunately oracular sentence comes from midway through Suttree, Cormac McCarthy's 1979 magnum opus. Open the book anywhere, and you'll find gold. Not so for McCarthy's newest, No Country for Old Men, which offers violence both unfeeling and unfelt, as well as language stripped down to the bone and at times maddeningly repetitive.

The story sounds promising enough: Llewelyn Moss, while hunting in the West Texas desert, finds the remains of a drug deal gone bad. Amid the carnage, Moss finds a bag containing more than $2 million. A troubled but good-hearted sheriff and a campy, cartoon villain (a type of which McCarthy seems inordinately fond) track his ensuing flight. It's in the delivery that things start to fall apart.

If you want a few hundred widely spaced, semi-suspenseful pages of unevenly voiced first-person philosophical treatises, clunky screenplay dialogue, and tiny declarative sentences about people putting their feet up on desks and taking them down again, this is the book for you. But for those of us who miss the lyricism and the literature of the earlier books, it might be best to consider McCarthy's oeuvre as an extended metaphor for the United States and the frontier on which he showers so much love and so much frustrated nostalgia. Where first there was boundless vision in an almost primeval darkness, followed by the exuberance of empire, there are now only the crabbed natterings of old men. And as McCarthy himself seems to conclude, this is no country for them. MAGDALEN POWERS.

^WILLFUL CREATURES

The writer's sweet touch makes twisted tales of human misfits addictive.

By Aimee Bender (Doubleday, 224 pages, $22.95)

Aimee Bender's fantastical new collection of stories, Willful Creatures, harkens back to the worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Only instead of talking animals, Bender presents human misfits. In "End of the Line," a fellow returns from a pet store with a little man in a cage. Like a petulant child, he loves his toy at first, then begins to torture him and finally nearly kills him. Suddenly, tormenting a hamster no longer seems so innocent.

Like the fairy tales they are modeled upon, the stories in Willful Creatures are meditations on power, but Bender gives readers this medicine with a spoon of sweetness. Her style remains light and fluffy throughout, and goes quickly to the head like a narcotic-anything is possible under its spell. Anything, that is, except rebellion. In "Job's Jobs," God repeatedly threatens a mortal away from creativity. When the man must put aside his typewriter, he takes up painting-only God forbids it. When God says to give up acting, he takes up cooking-which God later bans, too. "This is it," says the Almighty. "Stop making beautiful food. What is with you?"

Bender clearly believes the mind is a powerful thing, and she demonstrates this truth by using the most elemental of building blocks. Readers know the sex and age of her characters, but as for the rest, we are meant to fill in on our own details. In "Death Watch," for instance, 10 men are told they have two weeks to live. "Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles." The simplicity of this opening is ingenious. Who could stop at this point? And so we read on, and this creepy short-story collection becomes a most unlikely page-turner. JOHN FREEMAN.