The Glass House by Chris Adrian, 2000
The magic trick:
Building to a transcendent closing scene
This is full-on historical fiction here. Hopefully you like that kind of thing.
Our hero, Will, is a soldier in the Union army trekking through a lot of the highlights from the Civil War’s eastern theater. He’s there for Antietam and Fredericksburg. He’s helping build the pontoon bridge ahead of Chancellorsville. He’s there at Gettysburg too.
It all builds to a truly transcendent closing scene, which I will not ruin here. It’s inventive and beautiful, though. It’s the kind of conclusion that probably was the germ of the entire story. Well worth the 15 pages and half-hour it will take you to get there.
And that’s quite a trick on Adrian’s part.
The selection:
At Fredericksburg, Frenchy was made busy by the carnage below Marye’s Heights. It was December, and bitter cold. Frenchy was lost in a wilderness of borrowed coat – his own was still wet from a fall off a pontoon bridge into the Rappahannock. He swam like an otter, and looked like one, with his wet brown hair and shiny black eyes.
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I read this story when it first came out in the New Yorker back in 2000. I was familiar with the graduates of Iowa and their penchant for modernist Civil war fiction (Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On was one, and the great Barry Hannah story Dragged Fighting from His Tomb is another), so this grabbed me right away.
We meet the unlikely and unlikable protagonist but don’t get to know him well except through the distain of his fellow soldiers.
His singular friend Jolly is the exception, a character described in just a few words that nonetheless make him vivid on the page (particularly his bouts of melancholy spiked with gallows levity, as when he toasts the wall of dead soldiers with “Your health, boys.”
The ending seems to tie this up a little too neatly to be really satisfying, but Adrian’s deft historical touch and shrewd word choices lend a degree of authenticity to the narrative.
I prefer his longer-form work such as the Civil War novel Gob’s Gift, but this piece definitely has a lot going for it.