One of the best debut novels in many years: The Yellow Birds

As usual, a range of opinions in book group last night - I'm always surprised but by this point should no longer be - at how much we can disagree after reading the same work of literature. BR was on the extreme this time, and pretty much alone there, but she made it clear that she thought Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds was amateurish and impenetrable - she said she loves war noels, but this one did not measure up for her (perhaps, I wonder, because it's not exactly a war novel, but an effects-of-war novel, much like its contemporary, the far less accomplished, in my view, Bill Lynn's Long Halftime Walk) - BR suggested The Iliad as our summer reading, so she's got the chops for sure. But I think she was wrong on Powers. J Ri and I were the most positive, each thinking it was an astonishingly good work of fiction, esp for a first-time novelist; apparently Powers has also written poetry, as some commented, and I don't know what literary path he will follow - but I do hope he writes more fiction - it would be a denigration to call this a poetic novel - who wants to read those? - but  personally was struck by the beauty of the writing, even if sometimes the beauty caved in on itself and became impenetrable, at least at first read: I did note that I feel the same say about some of the greatest writers. Proust and Joyce, e.g. - that their work is sometimes just beyond my grasp, and that I should go back again and give it deeper attention. A really high compliment for Powers, but well deserved. M discussed similarities, surprisingly, between Bartle and Bartleby; LR was inspired to read a poem he had written some years ago about the Vietnam War: something like Ideas for a Vietnam Memorial, which he thought should be a shit-smelling cesspool (images like this do come up in Yellow Birds, BTW) - and his poem went on to describe a young soldier he knew when he served who died in combat. Very good poem, and I encourage LR to pursue this and to perhaps write a memoir of his service as a dr. - something not well chronicled, except in MASH (set in Korea, for political reasons I guess); also encouraged him to read old friend Michael Casey's Obscenities, still one of the great American war poetry collections. Much discussion about the trauma of war, and it reminded M of the Ghost Road, and me of Atonement, and also - though not a war novel - of Netherland, in its account of survival of trauma (9/11 in that case) in a narrative voice that I called first-person reminiscent. Powers does so much so well in Yellow Birds, from incredibly well rendered scenes of battle, with all the fear and confusion, almost Tolstoyan, and some long a dark pastoral sections as well - Bartle's long walk along the railroad tracks and river banks, his watching his friends across the water bath and play, innocent and distant, his brush with suicide, with death, and his lapse into complete numbness. This book has more to say about American views of war than books 5 times its length - so much in here, and such a promising novelist.