`The Rest is Silence'

Richard Bausch’s Peace is the finest new work of fiction I’ve read since Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. What they have in common is spare, exacting language and a maturity about the world. Both are written by adults for adults. The artistic stance crafted by Bausch and Petterson inspire confidence in the narrators and, by extension, the authors. Pop culture, as content or method, is virtually absent from both, though Peace makes passing mention of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. Like Peace, Catch-22 is set in Italy during World War II but never transcends its essential identity as a seditious cartoon. Only a strong, flexible version of “realism”—you won’t find a comprehensive definition of that Tar Baby here -- is equipped to render war, and most of the rest of life, in language. Imagine Donald Barthelme, the minor New Yorker humorist, deploying his tedious little collages on the subject of the Battle of Monte Cassino.

In his preface to The Stories of Richard Bausch (2003), Bausch describes the novelist’s task as “constructing an involving, believable imaginative expression about things that matter.” Such definitions are notoriously slippery and of necessity fail to include some good work (Bausch’s leaves out At Swim-Two-Birds but not Molloy). We might call Bausch’s approach common-sensical, one shared by thoughtful common readers. Even those of us who never served in the military and who were born after V-E day recognize that the experiences, and reflections on those experiences, endured by Bausch’s squad of American infantrymen are “things that matter,” not jokes or trendy poses. The late Anthony Hecht, an infantry veteran of World War II, wrote in “`More Light! More Light!’”:

“Much casual death had drained away their souls.”

We bring to Bausch’s story some understanding of war, however inadequate, as we bring an understanding of human nature, the raw matter of any story. Our reading of Peace quietly, methodically challenges what we think we know about men in war and ourselves. He concludes his Stories preface with this:

“I have always believed that writing stories is not so much a matter of obsession as it is of devotion – being there for work in the days, as the good men and women who came before you were; attempting to be as determined and stubborn and willing to risk failure as they were. You work in the perfect understanding that you will probably never write as well as they, but that by being faithful to their example, you can be worthy of their company. The rest is silence.”

Bausch might be writing about the men in his beleaguered squad in Italy and the rest of us, whether or not we are writers.