Chums of War
Pat Barker revisits the trauma of World War I
Richard Locke
Life Class:
A Novel
by Pat Barker
Doubleday
$23.95 List Price
After more than a dozen years and three other novels, Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy––Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—remains a notable example of scrupulous historical realism quite happily unencumbered by postmodernist prejudices. In a 2003 interview in Bookforum, she was blunt: “What fiction has to offer is, above all, characterization. If this makes me a tremendously
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