End of Active Service

April 22, 2024
Iraq War veteran Young (Eat the Apple, a memoir) explores in his artful and piercing debut novel the challenges of returning from combat to civilian life. Former Marine Corps lance corporal Dean Pusey, 23, is back in his hometown of Richfield, Ind., after multiple deployments to Iraq, beginning when he enlisted at 18 in 2006. He moves in with his adoptive mother and pacifist stepfather, gets a job loading trucks for UPS, and drinks with his childhood best friend. At a bar, he meets a young woman named Max and the two stumble into a relationship. All the while, Dean harshly judges the complacency and corpulence of his civilian neighbors, struggles with terrible memories of the war, and enlists the ghost of his deceased brother-in-arms Israel Ruiz, who died after returning home, in imaginary combat drills. Dean is drawn to Max because she’s the only person who treats him like he isn’t broken, but when she becomes pregnant, he struggles to see himself as a father. Young takes readers deep inside his protagonist’s tortured mind to show what PTSD feels like and how, for Dean, “Most every story is a war story.” The result is an essential addition to the literature of war. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

May 15, 2024
Back home in Indiana after two tours with the Marines in Iraq, Dean meets Max in a dive bar. The night ends with Dean getting badly beaten, but first Max disarms Dean with her honesty and genuine interest in him. Dean can't sleep without a little something from his dealer friend, can't enter a building without running safety drills on it in his head, can't speak without thinking of the more upsetting things he could, perhaps should, say. But he knows he loves Max. When Max gets pregnant, Dean can't believe her belief in him, but it's after baby River's arrival that the walls really close in, and Dean's ghosts become full-blown constant companions, namely the battle buddy he truly loved and a sheep Dean once nurtured but couldn't save. 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.

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Starred review from June 15, 2024
"Really, though, when you get down to it, most everything is a war story, right?" Dean Pusey is having a tough time adjusting to life back in Indiana after having served four years as a Marine in Iraq. He's living with his (adoptive) mother and stepfather, working at UPS, and hanging out with his childhood best friend. None of it, however, is going well, and Dean is still at war--if only with himself and PTSD. Floundering on his way to becoming "someone" rather than "anyone," Dean struggles to discern whether he is the problem in all his relationships, including the one he never had with his birth mother. Unfortunately, the discernment process involves a lot of alcohol, some drugs, bar fights, a rifle, and pretend battle exercises. Flashbacks to brutal episodes Dean witnessed and participated in during his tours of duty come fast and furious, but Dean is not ready, willing, or able to reveal what he's still carrying around in his head. 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. As Dean narrates the course of what he promises will be a love story--while opining that war stories underpin almost every experience--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, the author of Eat the Apple (2018), a memoir detailing his own service with the Marines in Iraq, 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.

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