Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder

March 8, 2010
Nichols takes the simple plot of a road trip and turns it upside down and sideways, with the structure more inter-esting than the content. The unnamed narrator writes a series of letters to a Polish woman named Luddie as the nar-rator takes his girlfriend and his grandfather back to the Polish village where “The Bombardier” as his grandfather was called was shot down during WWII, and where Luddie helped him survive. The three continually tell each other stories the narrator retells to Luddie. Nichols handles beautifully the hidden meanings in old family tales heard a hundred times, but suddenly seen in the light of the casual racism and sexism prevalent in the decades after the war. It's as though a set of nesting dolls exploded into thousands of puzzle pieces that won't quite fit together anymore. One way it seems like “the truth” and then another detail comes up in another story that changes that truth. Tightly structured, with many repetitive phrases serving as a choral backdrop to the action, the novel often reads like a piece of music that is wonderfully original.

March 1, 2010
Nichols, an editor at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, wields a dramatically off-kilter viewpoint in his debut novel about wars and the men who fight them.

The narrator is a 24-year-old pacifist who refers to himself only as Madame Psychosis and punctuates his tale with arcane pronouncements about the nature of time. Eventually he reveals that he's in the midst of a journey to Poland with his 84-year-old grandfather,"the Bombardier." This veteran of World War II flew more than 50 missions before being shot down near the Russian front and rescued by Luddie, a reluctant member of the Polish underground. The book takes the form of letters to Luddie, even though they can't be delivered yet because one purpose of the trip is to find her. Nonetheless, the narrator tells Luddie in lyrical but perplexing epistles about his journey to Poland with his grandfather and his lover Bernadette. We see the Bombardier, an elderly Rotarian and former mayor of a small Midwestern town, rediscovering his youthful memories. His grandson's bewilderment over what to do about the 9/11 attacks highlights the differences between then and now. There's a lot of meaty material here, but the way Nichols tells his story may only appeal to the most broadminded readers."Dear Luddie, Do you have any babies?" appears as the only words on an otherwise blank page. Some of the narrator's musings seem like meaningless white noise:"Dear Luddie, When you were a small piece of orange light, I held you in my blue-veined arms." Eventually the acerbic Bernadette starts to make the most sense."The point is that you and the Bombardier have messed up ideas about what's boring and what's pointless," she says.

A promising premise, but the experimental approach dulls much of the natural drama.

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