OFF WE GO INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER

Nichols, an editor at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, wields a dramatically off-kilter viewpoint in his debut novel about wars and the men who fight them.

The narrator is a 24-year-old pacifist who refers to himself only as Madame Psychosis and punctuates his tale with arcane pronouncements about the nature of time. Eventually he reveals that he’s in the midst of a journey to Poland with his 84-year-old grandfather, “the Bombardier.” This veteran of World War II flew more than 50 missions before being shot down near the Russian front and rescued by Luddie, a reluctant member of the Polish underground. The book takes the form of letters to Luddie, even though they can’t be delivered yet because one purpose of the trip is to find her. Nonetheless, the narrator tells Luddie in lyrical but perplexing epistles about his journey to Poland with his grandfather and his lover Bernadette. We see the Bombardier, an elderly Rotarian and former mayor of a small Midwestern town, rediscovering his youthful memories. His grandson’s bewilderment over what to do about the 9/11 attacks highlights the differences between then and now. There’s a lot of meaty material here, but the way Nichols tells his story may only appeal to the most broadminded readers. “Dear Luddie, Do you have any babies?” appears as the only words on an otherwise blank page. Some of the narrator’s musings seem like meaningless white noise: “Dear Luddie, When you were a small piece of orange light, I held you in my blue-veined arms.” Eventually the acerbic Bernadette starts to make the most sense. “The point is that you and the Bombardier have messed up ideas about what’s boring and what’s pointless,” she says.

A promising premise, but the experimental approach dulls much of the natural drama.