War fiction

The Great War produced a new kind of war literature because it produced a new kind of disillusionment. Earlier war writing, whatever its horrors, mostly kept faith with the big abstractions — glory, honor, the cause. The men who came back from the Western and Italian fronts had watched those words administrate a slaughter of millions, and the fiction they wrote treats the vocabulary itself as a casualty.

The result is a genre defined less by battle scenes than by their aftermath: Hemingway's Frederic Henry declaring the abstract words 'obscene beside the concrete names of villages'; Céline's Bardamu concluding within a chapter that cowardice is the only sane response; the veterans of In Our Time fishing rivers where the war never comes up and never goes away. The war book of this era is usually about what cannot be said at the dinner table afterward.

Read it as the root system of everything else on our shelves. The expatriate party, the memoirs, even the banned books — all of it grows out of the four years these novels face directly.