Longtime TEV readers will know all too well our devotion to Pat Barker's superb Regeneration trilogy. With her new novel, Life Class, she returns to the World War I milieu she so memorably depicted in those earlier novels. Alan Cheuse has called her "the peacetime novelist who knows best how to write about war" and the San Francisco Chronicle thinks that "Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters…and resists the trappings of a neat love story, reminding us once again that in art and life we remain infinitely mysterious." Here's the Independent:
Barker's evocation of the front-line hospital is masterly, gripping in its narrative thrust and judicious in its use of detail - the twitching stump of an amputated leg, gunfire rocking water in a glass. If there is a whiff of the card-index, she herself briskly acknowledges that with the comprehensive list of sources, from Henry Tonks's Art and Surgery to Vera Brittain's diary. It is no criticism to say that I at once wanted to get hold of those titles that I did not know; simply a recognition of this divide: there is the reality, and there is the invention it has generated.
So, as before, as always the song remains the same. Drop us an email, subject line "I GOT CLASS" Prior winners ineligible. And please be certain to include your full mailing address. We'll take all entries until 7 p.m. P.S.T and then the Random Number Generator - which we assure you is neither slight nor sexist - will anoint a winner. Until then, enjoy this glimpse of the fine Barker profile in the New Yorker.
UPDATE: Congratulations to winner Theodore Blackston on NY, NY.
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