Iraq and a hard place: The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds is a slim and graceful novel, or novella maybe, that reminds me of a similarly brief novel that won the Pulitzer a few years ago, Tinkers, and I think Powers should have been in contention this year - haven't quite finished Yellow Birds yet but it's actually a much better work than Tinkers: both finely styled, at times even over-wrought, but Yellow Birds is a well-wrought story, carefully constructed, with a lot to say about American youth, American values, and the wages of war: in short, it's the simple story of two young men, Army buddies, and how each is destroyed, one literally, by service in Iraq. The narrator, Bartle (a Melvillean echo? He'd prefer not to?) , survives to tell the story of his buddy, Murphy, who died in Iraq - not yet clear how that happened, but seems that there was something underhanded about the death as the Army comes to Bartle to investigate, and Bartle, ruined by the war, a social isolate, alcoholic, living in abject poverty, with no hope or goals and with bedeviling thoughts of suicide. Powers presents some amazingly well-written passages: his account of the soldiers moving across an orchard as enemy fire tears through the branches overhead; the mortar attack on an open-air market; Bartle wondering along the shores of the James River near his home in Richmond; the tiny building in which Bartle sets up his abject residence. The literary influences are profound and diverse, as is often the case with first novels (which I think this is): one Joycean-Faulknerian section, another evocative of Hemingway (who inevitably influences any serious American who writes about battle and warfare). At times, the prose is a little thick for me, especially when Powers has Bartle step back and analyze or explain what he was doing or thinking (he's writing this from a later perspective, about 8 years after the events of the novel), but I feel that I'm in the hands of, or company of, a very intelligent guide and stylist who makes these scenes - and a variety of scenes, from the frenzy of battle in the desert to the swampy, Idyllic Virginia forests - seem true and alive. And all that and he maintains the mystery of the book throughout: how did Murph(y) die in Iraq and why does Bartle feel responsible for that death?