End of Active Service

Reviews

Debut novelist Young deftly maneuvers between Dean’s postdischarge life and the corrosive and brutalizing events of his military service and clearly conveys the jarring realities of transitioning from wartime to lifetime . . . humor and perceptive insights mark the storytelling; people he meets want to hear about his war experiences, but what they really want to do is to tell him about their own, or secondhand, war stories. Young . . . delivers a cleareyed, nonsentimental chronicle of the corrosive and far-reaching effects of war and its inevitable aftermath . . . War is hell, but Young shows us that what happens afterward can be worse. Young’s writing style is staccato, clipped, propulsive . . . the story of a young vet desperate to shed the habits of mind and body that were drilled into him . . . [End of Active Service] reinforces the personal consequences of war and violence: the heavy physical and psychological weight and the habits of mind that are so obdurate and hard to interrupt. Young creates and sustains an unbearable tension. Artful and piercing . . . an essential addition to the literature of war. Piercingly explores what happens when a service member leaves the Marines and returns home . . . Young skillfully deploys repetition and immersive memories to amplify the toxic spirals of Dean's thoughts. End of Active Service is an unsparing, fist-clenching ride. Perfectly captures that dichotomy of the American military - to protect individual freedoms, we must destroy our own individual freedoms - in beautiful, hilarious, horrifying prose. Matt Young brilliantly captures the peculiar mixture of pride and sorrow that comes with fighting in our modern wars, and the difficult work of reintegration into civilian life. But more than simply a war story, End of Active Service is a powerful and deeply affecting portrait of the challenges of life and fatherhood, with characters you come to care for deeply. Young writes with howling musicality, bounding between Iraq and Indiana with the dexterity of a pro and the mania of truth. The effect is irresistible, hilarious, and poignant when least expected. At once a raw portrait of trauma and a takedown of macho brouhaha, End of Active Service delivers shock and awe on every page. Warning: this is not a war story. It’s the story after the war, the story of rebuilding, painful and raw, brutal in its bald honesty, beautiful too, and startlingly funny. So intimate you’ll feel it in your body like a gut-punch, with a voice both taunting and tender. As we’re told in the novel’s incredible opening, this is a love story, though you won’t find it all that familiar. A brilliant, necessary debut novel that surprised me again and again. I didn’t want it to end. A blistering account of America's forever-war with itself. End of Active Service begins where our mythology leaves off, and in remarkable, machine-gun-fire prose reveals the deep wounds we all carry. An important book for our time. Life after war is just another kind of war for the narrator of Matt Young’s extraordinary, compelling, and brutally insightful debut novel, End of Service. Written in spare, poetic prose, Young’s unflinching immersion in the life of his traumatized protagonist makes the war novel new again. Young is a frank, funny and mercilessly self-lacerating narrator. His writing is entertaining and experimental . . . Eat the Apple is a brilliant and barbed memoir of the Iraq War. Raw, disturbing, hilarious, and unsparing book . . . a brutally honest account of what it's like to be a Marine and fight in a war. Young throws readers into Dean's wars with the same tough love as his outstanding memoir, Eat the Apple (2018), writing in rhythmic military shorthand to hypnotizing effect. Dean insists that he's telling us a love story, and in Young's utterly contemporary war novel, he's right, several times over. Expand reviews