The Deadening

"Set in 1921, [this novel follows] Harrell Hickman and Willem Redd, [who] have returned home from no man's land and the brutality of war in the trenches in France. Neither has been able to resume what they were or might have been after living through the senselessness of bodies blown up and the crushing deaths from machine gun fire, poisonous gas, and mortars day after day after day. Back in the U.S., Hickman walks away from an overcrowded veteran's hospital where he is being treated for 'shell shock, ' a devastating mental disease that today is benignly called PTSD. Redd, who barely survived shattering wounds, is hospitalized at Walter Reed; on release, he returns to his family and home in Wisdom, Nebraska. Both Hickman and Redd happen to meet in Wisdom, where Hickman ends up after hopping freight trains west. The chance encounter of these damaged young men leads to a number of dramatic clashes that in their unfolding bear the semblance of foreordained Greek tragedy"--