A Midnight Clear:

...The novel is at its best as we await what will happen on the "midnight clear" of the traditional carol...

...Their rejection of the war is . wider: they belong to a specially selected group of draftees who were test-selected for high I.Q.'s to make up some elite battalions that have since been broken up into regular units whose commanders sneer at them as "whiz kids...

...We never get to care for the individual fates of the soldiers or feel for them as we do for the characters in Dad and Birdy...

...Here "Birdy" has entered his ultimate fantasy, crouching about and jumping like a bird, refusing to eat or act like a human - after being wounded in a terrifying attack by Japanese in the South Pacific...

...There are times when one has to put down his books not because they are boring, or, on the other hand, too thrilling, but simply because of the need to break from a draining but powerful conversation with a friend in an emotional crisis...

...will goodwill unexpectedly break out among men...

...For him, the Seine is still near the Ardennes...

...Birdy and Dad catch something essential about life: the pain we suppress for the sake of social sanity, but must acknowledge in some form lest we scream...

...Unfortunately, it takes some time to get A Midnight Clear moving, and it remains potent only as an allegory because Wharton leaves his most effective weapon behind, his gift for describing inspired insanity in his two previous novels...

...The local Germans do not cooperate by attacking, however...

...The language is quick, nota-tional, dominated by the present tense even when recollecting, and peppered by sharp wit and home truths...

...A war book, ironically, replaces bang with whimper...

...The army squad is a microcosm, both of family and social types...

...Birdy concerns a youth who raises parakeets so well, and observes them so faithfully, that he eventually hallucinates entry into their world...

...his friend's description of how he nearly went mad in combat worthy of All Quiet on the Western Front has a powerful climactic effect on Birdy's "illness...

...In A Midnight...

...As in so many combat novels, the real enemy is thus behind the lines, not in front of them...

...There's a Jew who wants to be an advertising executive, a health nut who wants to be a doctor, a mechanical genius, "Mother" Wilkins (so nicknamed because he constantly worries about all of the others) and "Father" Mundy (an ex-seminarian who persuades the squad to abjure profanity to mark their dissent from the regular army...

...It is a loony, magnificent novel, not only in its treatment of a brotherly kind of friendship, but also in its contrast between Birdy's harmless pastoral among the parakeets and the larger madness of modern weapons...

...Birdy and Dad are cathartic wrestlings with that pain, and finally function like exorcisms...

...The narrative voices in both books, moreover, are dominated by an urgent, pained need to communicate...

...Won't" recalls the events from calm retrospect, many years after the fateful Christmas...

...Dad concerns the terminal sickness of the narrator's father - sickness relieved by flights of inspired fantasies of a better life...

...Were it not for faith engendered by Dad and Birdy, I would not have continued...

...The only time these opening sections come alive involves remembrances of training camp before the squad got to the cold plains of northern France...

...My advice: buy the earlier books and read them instead.read them instead...

...In Birdy and Dad, the narrators recollect past events too, but in the middle of a present crisis - a crisis usually generated by some form of both sublime and pitiable dementia that adds an especially poignant and simultaneously terrifying aspect to the climax...

...Dad and Birdy are grueling both in what they give and what they take, full of frank talk and genuinely tough confrontations...

...the mood of these still, quiet, suspenseful sections of the book is perfectly caught in the cover illustration by the author, who actually spends most of his time on his houseboat, painting...

...Their particular commander, Major Love, is a former undertaker, and seems to regard them as cannon fodder...

...At its best, A Midnight Clear is a moving allegory about the difficulties of making peace, not war...

...Inexperienced but determined to stick together, the squad plays at war by the book, setting up foxholes, telephone posts, and code words for safe passage around the chateau and surrounding estate...

...It relates the story of a squad of young soldiers in an intelligence and reconnaissance unit during the Ardennes Offensive (or the Battle of the Bulge) around Christmas 1944, when their unscrupulous superiors first position and then nearly abandon them in a deserted chateau near the German lines...

...A Midnight Clear brings together these concerns with war and family life, but without Wharton's usual interest in madness...

...If Wharton wanted us to catch boredom as the essence of military life, he has succeeded, and in so doing committed the imitative fallacy...

...But Wharton's "family" in A Midnight Clear is made of wit, not substance...

...A Midnight Clear is like taps...

...Listening to him," the narrator comments, "is like Laura Ingalls Wilder as told to Lewis Carroll and produced by Walt Disney...

...In Dad, the narrator, enduring a meal between a sick father and an emotionally intolerant mother, comments, "We get through the meal fine, but I develop indigestion waiting for something to happen...

...their tone is vulgar, earthy, earnest, immediate...

...In part, the problem is structural: Wharton spends too much time describing the family and self-indulgently delineating its superiority to the army before the real story truly begins...

...Clear, Wharton pursues his sense of extraordinary human riches destroyed by the madness of the so-called normal world, but without a crisis and a genuine Quixote at the center, he never soars...

...Tom O'Brien WILLIAM WHARTON - a pseudonym for an American living in a houseboat on the Seine - is one of the finest writers in English today...

...A Midnight Clear, however, is somber, almost monotonous...

...In a sense, the nickname of Wharton's narrator sums up the squad's relation to the rest of the army: he is Sergeant Will Knott, alias "Won't...

...This is no more true than in the last one hundred pages of Birdy, when the hero's friend tries to help him recover in a mental hospital after World War II...

...With such small brushstrokes and the accumulative Niagara-like force of his prose, Wharton domesticates madness and insinuates how all strong feeling - in all of us - borders an abyss...

...The conclusion is magnificent...

...instead, they tease the squad by building strange scarecrows in the woods, staging ambushes that they fail to take advantage of, throwing snowballs instead of grenades, and finally decorating a fir tree with Christmas gifts and signs...

...His previous works, Birdy and Dad, drew on experiences of family life and war to create rich, powerful, and vivid treatments of a prevalent modern theme, the close proximity of certain types of madness and imaginative moral vision...

...Most importantly, the narrative voice of A Midnight Clear is cool and detached...

...Reading Wharton is like being buttonholed by a modern version of the Ancient Mariner reciting a story of Dostoevsky translated into English by Lenny Bruce...