Brief Encounters with the Enemy

June 24, 2013
A young American soldier combats boredom in the title entry of this collection of eight bleak stories about life during wartime. In “Victory,” a disabled supermarket cashier woos a kleptomaniac high school student from a wealthy family and watches as his coworkers get called off to fight. Jealous of the attention given to a friend returning from military service, a miserable call center employee takes out his dissatisfaction on his customers in “Operators.” “Enchantment” shows a man trying to readjust to his former life as a prep school teacher and his relationship with a married woman after coming back from his tour of duty. Set during an unnamed conflict and in unnamed cities, these stories revolve around the way war affects middle- and working-class Americans, whether they are leaving to fight or staying behind. Sayrafiezadeh portrays the repetitive monotony of depression and stagnation in his character’s lives with skill, and though this repetition can be hard-going, the collection as a whole illuminates the wide range of motivations that drive people to go to war. Often beautiful, sometimes lifeless, and almost entirely without hope, these stories reflect the listlessness of our times. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

July 15, 2013
It turns out that war is more boring than hell in these tangentially connected short stories from the author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (2009). The author's collection feels very much like a product of work created for the audiences of the New Yorker and Granta, publications to which he contributes. While the stories aren't strictly linked to each other, it's obvious that they've been set in the same world, although Sayrafiezadeh goes to great pains to strip his milieu down to a pure, abstract canvas. The stories are set in a world at war, or wars, somewhere on a peninsula. It's not always clear which country each story is set in, either, although the United States is clearly identified as one of the combatants. The centerpiece is "A Brief Encounter with the Enemy," during which an American serviceman named Luke finally finds a way to break up the tedium of war. But the story is a rare jab to readers who may be put off by the obscurity of the rest of the collection. Many of the stories, such as "Cartography" and "Appetite," deal with characters who are not living up to their potentials, toiling in dead-end jobs. Others, like "Enchantment" and "Operators," examine the aftermath of war with a perplexing simplicity for a writer who is clearly capable of deeper insights. The soldier in "Enchantment" is particularly disappointing, as he waits for a class of prep school students to recognize that "We won" is the right answer to his question: "I'd hold nothing back and they'd be spellbound. Death by drowning, by burning, by whatever means we had available. That was how we won the war." An interesting experiment in nontraditional fiction but a somewhat disappointing follow-up from a talented new voice.

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August 1, 2013
Sayrafiezadeh follows his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free (2010), with an arresting fiction debut that chronicles modern, nameless cities crumbling in the shadows of war. These eight stories offer first-person accounts of alienated men seeking significance, who view war as an opportunity for escape or adventure. In some stories the unspecified conflict is mere speculation, while others explore the dark emotional aftermath of international battles; taken together, they criticize the disenchantments of war with dramatic, novel-like energy. Upon returning from combat, a sixth-grade history teacher struggles to reconnect with his students, who prefer the substitute. A Walmart manager sells stolen goods to his dream girl's family-owned store to help a friend who enlists in the military to solve his financial woes. And in the scathing title story, a young soldier spends the final day of his yearlong deployment realizing war often instills fear and disappointment rather than heroism and machismo. With insightful humor and a keen eye for offbeat details, Sayrafiezadeh, entertaining and political without being heavy-handed, is a force to be reckoned with.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)