War Boys - Hardcover

M. A. SCHAFFNER has published some 300 poems in journals throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Prairie Schooner, The Boston Phoenix, and The Texas Review. Schaffner’s poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels won the Washington Writers’ Center publication prize and the Columbia Book Award. Schaffner lives in Arlington, VA, with his wife and two pugs.

With all the flashy metafiction flying off the presses these days, it's a pleasure to read a good, old-fashioned bildungsroman. In the first novel from poet Schaffner, it's 1968 and 14-year-old Charles Barker finds himself transferred with his officer father to the U.S. naval station at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Joining the local Explorer Scouts post, the reserved, intellectual youth--who enjoys studying famous battles and reenacting them with painted lead figurines--begins gaining real-life experience as the troop, with nominal adult supervision, marches into the jungle to stage mock military exercises. War, both real and pretend, permeates the eloquently described, jungle-draped setting, and Schaffner makes keen study of the institutions that wage it. He has a vivid recollection of the way teenaged boys interact, and we believe most of it when they emulate their fathers by speaking tough, Hollywood soldierese. Occasionally, however, the liberal author can't help slipping his message into their lines, or into the narrative, despite having done a perfectly good job of making it apparent through action. Keir Graff
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