A SEASON PAST

Three narratives—two novellas and a short story—explore the struggles warriors face.

In the first of Bartley’s novellas, A Season Past, an infamous gunfighter, Coltrane, sells his prospecting land in Alaska and moves to Crystal, Utah, in search of peace and solitude. But that tranquility proves exasperatingly elusive—wherever he goes, his reputation precedes him, and he’s always met with a mixture of fear and hostility. Coltrane does his best to keep to himself, doggedly haunted by nightmares of past violence, but Sheriff Bryant holds a grudge against him for killing his uncle and remains committed to driving him out of town. Meanwhile, Coltrane develops feelings for Elisabeth, a woman engaged to one of the local deputies, a romantic opportunity as enticing as it seems doomed. In the second novella, The Cold Ardennes, an unnamed protagonist returns from fighting in World War II to a Texas town where he is now a stranger. He’s warned that “strangers in this town don’t stand a chance.” He struggles to find work, and is pulled into a bank heist by a girl named Sally, who sent him a Dear John letter while he was overseas. And in the short story “Those Apache Tears,” a young park ranger, Nikki-Boy, wrestles with the consequences of his military service in Vietnam. He’s a Native American and his own people refuse to celebrate his laudable efforts, resentful that he’s become a “pawn” of a government that has historically oppressed them. While each of the author’s artfully melancholic stories can be read independently of the others, the group is thematically united by an unsentimental appraisal of combat. As the protagonist of the second novella plainly but poignantly puts it: “Sir, there was nothing adventurous about killing. It was hard, slogging, ugly work that never got easier the more you did it. It involved a lot of mud and cold and noise during the artillery barrages. Men don’t die easily, they never do.”

Bartley’s writing is poetically threadbare and powerful—he eludes the common temptation to tell a romanticized tale about heroic triumph. Instead, he unflinchingly presents the grimness of fighting in all of its ugliness, and the ways in which it bedraggles the souls of its participants. For example, Coltrane never permits himself a moment of idealistic self-delusion: “But he knew he had never been a hero. He had tried to kill the men who were trying to kill him. That was all.” The short story is the weakest of the bunch, and the most laboriously didactic—it flirts dangerously with delivering a moralistic sermon while its companion tales show more than tell. But overall, the book is a candid look not only at the damage done to warriors, but also the harsh reception they often receive from those for whom they offered their sacrifices.

An affecting assemblage of tales that deftly dramatize the ghastly costs of violence.