STRINGER

Shaded by austerity, this is a contained but eloquent cryptofable very much of and for our time and stepping just beyond it to a point where we seem to be continually at war -- for war simply grows like ""a tree."" And about Stringer, rarely amplified with another name, a loner, stealthy by instinct, remote, careful, who turned his back on his own ""history, the special persistent echo of small American towns, confident families, secure futures"" to join a civilian branch of the army, SAG, where with his closest friend Steinberg he performs secret missions fought with scopes adn sensors and bombs and codes and coordinates. To shorten the war if only by an hour. Just, who wrote Soldier of the Revolution (1970), is a flawlessly clean and precise writer even where he is teasing possibilities we only sense rather than fully identify -- it is a short, powerful book of a foreclosed future world where we can only play a waiting game between anonymity and annihilation.