SOLDIER IN GERMANY

In Snyder’s novel, a U.S. Air Force airman survives the Vietnam War and is sent to Germany, where he falls in love with a girl pictured on a billboard.

Although he was shot up severely enough in Vietnam to be offered a medical discharge, 20-something Chris Adams is still trying to make sense of his life, so he asks to be transferred to Germany—trading a hot war for a cold one. In his new posting, he’s part of a detail that’s keeping electronic tabs on the Soviets. Before he gets to the U.S. Air Force base, he sees a photo of a ravishing young girl on a billboard alongside the autobahn, and later, he runs into her in a local nightclub. After a rocky start, they grow close and fall in love. Nikolina “Nikki” von Lotzenburg is a successful model who’s 17 and troubled. Her complicated mother and creepy stepfather have taken charge of her career. Snyder’s novel starts out with standard-issue carping about military life but turns into a gripping love story. The effective way that the affair toggles between joy and despair is a credit to the author’s remarkable skill as a writer. Along the way, readers get some wonderful backstories, with many rooted in the turmoil in Germany through World War I, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and World War II. The book has some memorable characters, including the cynical and wise German Bernhard Becker, who’s Chris’ good friend, and his barracks mates, who cover their fierce brotherhood with wisecracks. Becker delivers an eloquent and frightening explanation of Hitler’s rise, and the novel’s account of Nikki’s mother’s background, involving a powerful Prussian family fleeing the Soviets after the Reich’s defeat, is sobering in its portrayal of how people can be reduced overnight from haughty aristocrats to dog-eat-dog survivors. Time and again, readers are reminded that ideas and actions have consequences, and that history is often a self-inflicted wound—and one that’s often septic.

A powerful book in which grimness and lyricism fight to a draw.