Robert Olmstead’s new novel demonstrates Robert E. Lee’s maxim: “It is well that war is so horrible, or we would grow to love it too much.”

In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, a sage vaquero tells our protagonist that “no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse.” The first installment of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy does not test the legitimacy of this equine maxim, but Robert Olmstead’s latest novel, the unapologetically McCarthy-esque Far Bright Star, seems to set for itself precisely that task.

Far Bright Star is a sequel, of sorts, to Olmstead’s prizewinning Coal Black Horse (2007), both novels dealing extensively with horses and war. While Coal Black Horse relates a young man’s coming-of-age during the Civil War, Olmstead’s latest is set in 1916 Mexico, where adventure-seeking Americans have drifted south of the border to hunt for Pancho Villa and his band of rebels. One such is our novel’s protagonist, a seasoned veteran named Napoleon, who leads an ill-fated sortie into the desert with a small band of would-be warriors.

As meticulously researched and evocative as a historical novel could be, Far Bright Star is about war of a very particular brand, the old-world physical combat that seems, in our era of the asymmetrical battlefield, like a thing from another millennium—reading this novel we see how the very nature of war has morphed, not just its accoutrements. There are no Predator drones, no JDAMs or laser-guided bombs: The combat Olmstead depicts is personal, and he allows the story he’s telling to reinforce this depiction organically. The physicality of combat is wondrously strange and fascinating:

His guts twisted. He knew he was dead and was wondering what death would be like when the Rattler horse, lithe as a cat, lurched onto its front feet, stretched out with its long neck and head and took the man’s whole face in its wide mouth. The bite swallowed whatever cry there might have been. It tore away the man’s nose and cheek meat, his lips and mustache and his eyebrows and all the skin and meat that was the man’s face.

Robert Olmstead

Personal. Even more impressive is that the novel slows down to focus on one engagement, capturing the fallout of a battle that feels and sounds and looks very real.

But certain aspects of conflict don’t change, and what Olmstead’s characters set out to confront is not what they will end up confronting, and the reason for the novel’s major battle will not end up being what they—or we—first thought. However the technology changes, “the fog of war,” the complexity of conflict that obscures everyone’s vision when they undertake this disastrous enterprise, remains.

Olmstead’s achievement is all the more striking given the setting and time and the way in which the author conjures (sometimes through detail, sometimes through rhythm and cadence) the atmosphere of Mexico in the early 20th century. We stay close to Napoleon via a narration which, like those of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian, makes of its telling a war-song. The prose (and prose poetry) of Far Bright Star achieves the lyrical minimalism of Melville and Faulkner, tempered by the muted precision of Hemingway. It doesn’t get away from Olmstead the way it so easily could, and the way it often does with writers working in this tradition.

The United States’ involvement in the hunt for Pancho Villa was the last affair in which horses were used extensively as a combat technology. Soon after, we entered the fray in Europe and leapt into a very different kind of fighting, one that didn’t allow for mounted troops, one fought in trenches and the modernist nightmare of No Man’s Land. It is on this note that Olmstead ends his novel with an extended passage as moving as anything in recent American fiction, in which our protagonist meditates on the war in Europe and the inevitability of his going to meet it.

In the end, we are left with a question: If the vaquero of All the Pretty Horses is correct that we can’t understand horses without warfare, can we then understand warfare without the horse? Put differently, in thinking of the wars we are presently waging, wars we watch on CNN like reality shows, in which technology has fundamentally changed the way we fight and the way we think about fighting, what have we lost and what have we gained? This is the strange and fascinating ambivalence of Far Bright Star and what, ultimately, makes it a great work of art: We feel the passion of war and all the primal urges it evokes, even as we are repulsed by it. Olmstead does a remarkable job of dramatizing a truth given voice by General Robert E. Lee. “It is well,” he said, “that war is so horrible, or we would grow to love it too much.”

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Denis Johnson strips bare and shucks the pump in his fast-moving literary noir, Nobody Move.

Over the past several years we have witnessed the revival of a uniquely American form: the literary crime novel. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men reminded readers of many things, chief among them that when you introduce the elements of outsized profits and men doing whatever it takes to procure them, stories take on an entirely different tension and even greater urgency. The heightened stakes in this kind of book are always the stakes of life and death.

And, of course, money.

Critics are already comparing Denis Johnson’s latest addition to the genre, Nobody Move (serialized last fall in Playboy), to literary forbears Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett—and these aren’t bad comparisons by any means. They just aren’t necessarily the best ones. The movement of Johnson’s sleek, sexy, often hilarious noir novel owes much more to McCarthy’s, as do several of Johnson’s plot details. No Country for Old Men features an illicit $2.4 million payday; in Nobody Move, $2.3 million is the figure. In No Country, evil guy (Anton Chigurh) pursues bad guy (Llewellyn Moss), gets shot in the leg and nurses himself back to health; Nobody Move’s bag guy (Jimmy Luntz) leg-shoots his novel’s evil guy (Ernest Gambol), who must be nursed by a woman who soon becomes a love interest. (Evil guys don’t generally get to have love interests; it’s nice to see that Johnson’s does.)

But Nobody Move is far from being derivative—rather, I see this as an example of the best kind of literary cross-pollination. I also see it as an interesting dynamic in which our best living writer influences, perhaps in ways entirely unconscious, our soon-to-be best living writer.

At the center of Johnson’s novel is the terminally sympathetic Luntz, member of a barbershop choir, a schlemiel, human yo-yo, and gambling addict. Early on, Luntz is intercepted by Gambol, henchman of a crime boss named Juarez, to whom Luntz owes his gambling debts. After Luntz’s initial escape from Gambol, he meets Anita Desilvera, a femme fatale who’s been framed by her husband for embezzlement. Luntz and Desilvera end up in bed quickly (but believably) and then together they flee Gambol and Juarez, who now seek a gruesome revenge on anti-hero Luntz: they plan to eat his testicles, a retributive delicacy they’ve indulged in before with other deadbeats. The couple’s intentions eventually escalate from simple escape to stealing the $2.3 million Desilvera’s husband embezzled and framed her for.

Denis Johnson

That’s all I’m willing to give away concerning the plot, whose tense twists and turns are unexpected and entirely satisfying—but plot, in this novel, is secondary to style, dialogue, and the classic Denis Johnson sentence: “After the film it was raining, a light, steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.” The truly amazing thing about Johnson’s prose is that it doesn’t let up, and he continues to stack great sentence upon great sentence, each image clear and surprising, each phrase delivered with a poet’s care. This is also true of 2007’s Tree of Smoke, for which he was awarded the National Book Award, and while the prose there is maximalist and recursive, the prose in Nobody Move is minimalist and built for speed. And yet, it’s no less impressive. Readers looking for quick and entertaining will find it here; those who want to ponder and dig beneath the surface are certain to unearth treasures to amaze.

But what finally strikes me about Nobody Move is the way Johnson takes the form revived by McCarthy and does something quite different in terms of atmosphere and tone, in terms of sex. No Country is bleakly apocalyptic, describing a desexualized world in which societal structures inevitably break down and fail. Nobody Move depicts an apocalypse that is smaller, personal, and thoroughly erotic, a vortex involving a handful of excessively libidinous characters. And, as is always the case with literary crime, we find ourselves, much like Luntz, placing bets on who will make it out alive, and on what they’ll make it out with.

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