Last week in The Atlantic, Matt Gallagher asked why we don't have a great novel about the War on Terror. I think he's right that a general disconnection from the war has made war novels a harder sell to publishers, and the lack of a draft means people who aren't already novelists aren't getting shipped to the front in the way they might have been in World War I and World War II. But I also think it's a matter of time — we haven't decided what the dominant literary or cinematic narrative out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are yet, and so our books and movies about the conflicts are still a bit diffuse.
That said, I just finished Lorraine Adams' novel The Room and the Chair, and while it's flawed, it's a striking and sometimes beautiful book about the institutions and people involved in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The flaws first: the novel isn't big enough for its story, which traces the staff of a newspaper, an Air Force Pilot, and a secretive intelligence operative through a plane crash, the release of a classified report, an accident in Afghanistan, and a secret mission into Iran. Adams use of vernacular can be inconsistent and ineffective, especially when she's trying to embody the novel's most unrealistic minor characters, a group of very young teenage prostitutes. But what's novel, and what I think really works about about The Room and the Chair, is the way that it draws a connection between Washington elites' failure to see the District of Columbia clearly and their inability to comprehend what's going on in the war they're covering.
Vera was beginning to see that her search faced a wall she'd not anticipated. Many had worked to build it. They rightly saw that the world must have its expertise. They believed it was too complicated for the common man, and for those beings with uncommon attributes — ghetto ballerina and passing mulatto — occupying lowly denominators — night cops and night editor — it was as narrow as pencils in fat, angry oceans. Stanley told Vera the obvious, how there were beats — night cops, Pentagon, White House, courthouse, legal affairs, Redskins — because there had always been beats. They predated the summer of '71; they were contemporaries of hansom cabs. Like a trotting horse pulling a woman in a petticoat, Stanley believed, beats kept the Room hidebound. And so Vera labored, trying to reach Jupiter on a pogo stick.
I don't want to say any more about the novel, because it ends in this tremendous expression of guilt and beauty. But even with its flaws, The Room and the Chair's a very good book both about the city of Washington and about our wars in Iraq and Afghanstan — and a reminder you can't understand the latter without understanding the former.