The Aardvark Is Ready for War
In the great American tradition of subversive war novels, The Aardvark Is Ready for War is a tour de force black comedy about one man's adventure inside the techno-military machine as he ships out aboard a naval aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf War. Caustic, disturbing, and fiercely funny, The Aardvark is Ready for War is the defining novel of modern warfare — that conducted with smart bombs and cathode ray tubes, and transmitted by CNN to homes across the world.
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In the great American tradition of subversive war novels, The Aardvark Is Ready for War is a tour de force black comedy about one man's adventure inside the techno-military machine as he ships out aboard a naval aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf War. Caustic, disturbing, and fiercely funny, The Aardvark is Ready for War is the defining novel of modern warfare — that conducted with smart bombs and cathode ray tubes, and transmitted by CNN to homes across the world.Publishers WeeklyThis rambling satire of Navy life during the Gulf War follows "the Aardvark" (a video-addicted specialist in decoding submarine traces) and his aircraft-carrier crewmates en route from California to the Persian Gulf. Blinn splices the nervous tedium of ship life with drunken shore-leave antics in Hawaii and the Philippines, poking fun along the way at boneheads of several stripes: patriotic yahoos, stuffed-shirt officers and (oddly enough, in a navy satire) "overeducated" feminist civilians. Near the crew's destinationand the end of the novela crime is committed, fatal accidents ensue and the Aardvark finally understands what war at sea is all about. For all its intellectual pretensions (beginning with an epigraph by Jean "The-Gulf-War-Did-Not-Take-Place" Baudrillard), this Pacific log is minor stuff. Lacking the truly horrified sensibilities of Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22 (to which the publishers compare the novel), Blinn's hyper, pseudo-Pynchonesque prose substitutes tired gags (shipboard food, naval lust) and a technophobia so half-baked it could be spouted by Beavis and Butt-head. What really sinks the story, however, is the Ardvark himself, a frat-boy-as-narrator who may echo the cynicism and fears of real-life sailors-in-arms but will tire other readers long before his maritime misadventures reach their punchline of death.
\ Publishers Weekly\ - Publisher's Weekly\ This rambling satire of Navy life during the Gulf War follows "the Aardvark" (a video-addicted specialist in decoding submarine traces) and his aircraft-carrier crewmates en route from California to the Persian Gulf. Blinn splices the nervous tedium of ship life with drunken shore-leave antics in Hawaii and the Philippines, poking fun along the way at boneheads of several stripes: patriotic yahoos, stuffed-shirt officers and (oddly enough, in a navy satire) "overeducated" feminist civilians. Near the crew's destinationand the end of the novela crime is committed, fatal accidents ensue and the Aardvark finally understands what war at sea is all about. For all its intellectual pretensions (beginning with an epigraph by Jean "The-Gulf-War-Did-Not-Take-Place" Baudrillard), this Pacific log is minor stuff. Lacking the truly horrified sensibilities of Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22 (to which the publishers compare the novel), Blinn's hyper, pseudo-Pynchonesque prose substitutes tired gags (shipboard food, naval lust) and a technophobia so half-baked it could be spouted by Beavis and Butt-head. What really sinks the story, however, is the Ardvark himself, a frat-boy-as-narrator who may echo the cynicism and fears of real-life sailors-in-arms but will tire other readers long before his maritime misadventures reach their punchline of death.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalThe Aardvark, nicknamed for the gas mask that air combatants must wear, is a tactical jet crewman on an aircraft carrier bound for the Persian Gulf War. Aardvark begins his story in this black comedy from the time of his call-up. He details his days as he readies himself for combat and then as the carrier sails toward its destination. Aardvark is increasingly at odds with his shipmates and the civilian world that he experiences on shore leave, but he is forced to face the reality of his situation. While darkly humorous, this is a deeply troubling novel that leaves one feeling empty. Dorian Harewood's reading gives life to an otherwise depressing book. Unless libraries are looking for fiction on the Gulf War, they might want to pass on this one.Germaine C. Linkins, SUNY at Potsdam Lib.\ \ \ San Antonio ExpressIT'S THE CATCH-22 OF THE GULF WAR \ Nearly every war in which America has become involved inspired at least one great work of literature: "The Red Badge of Courage," "All Quiet On The Western Front," "A Farewell To Arms," "From Here To Eternity," "Catch-22," "Going After Cacciatto." It is a paradox endemic to the human race: Out of destruction comes creativity.\ "The Aardvark Is Ready For War" is the first novel to address the media-hyped craziness of the Gulf War. Its protagonist, Aardvark\ (self-named because he resembles said animal when wearing a gas mask), is a late twentieth-century version of Holden Caulfield--with quite a bit mor attitude and moxie. Upon shipping out, Aardvark finds himself amid a crew of military types that seems to have stepped straight out of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." When he questions the wisdom of deploying anti-submarine weapons against the Iraqi navy, which has no submarines, the response is, "What else we gonna do?" As their ship slowly steams toward the Gulf, Aardvark and his mates run through their daily training exercises (hunting phantom submarines), and try to enjoy shore leave in strange societies. Bucking the system, trying to make some sense of his life and the strange detached war he is fighting, Aardvark struggles to overcome his fascination with living life at arm's length. A voyeur who enjoys secretly videotaping women (and just about everything else), Aardvark is a true child of the video generation. He feels detached from everything. His job in the navy, anti-submarine warfare specialist, leaves him feeling even more detached as the "enemy" becomes little more than a blip on the screen. He is the ultimate young adult of the '90s; with numbed senses and the attention span of a fruit fly, Aardvark never really enjoys the pleasures life has to offer. He is always grasping for quantity rather than quality, as in this scene wherein Aardvark, who is still waiting to ship out, is studying a computer simulation, eyeballing a lovely neighbor through his window and watching television:\ "I get the mirror off the door to the head. I prop it on the kitchen stool and angle it so it reflects out the window to her living room. HER window in MY room. I have to go sit on the sofa twice before I get it set up right. Early warning. "Then I clear off the coffee table and arrange everything just so: the taste-tempting frozen dinner, my brew, computer keyboard in front of that, the mouse run out to its black, neoprene pad. TV remote on the right, binoculars on the left. Then I snap on the web belt the aardvark mask hangs from. \ "I punch in TACPRO. When the menu pops up I run the cursor down to MK 82 Bomb Run. While that's loading I punch the channel flipper to CNN. It's a story about Israeli kids decorating their gas masks with finger paints--flags and missiles and jets. I check the mirror on the stool. All's quiet on the awesome babe front. I'm set."\ \ That one passage conveys the manic surrealism of the Gulf War (which was even given its own logo by media covering it), the first modern conflict that could be viewed as entertainment by an entire generation. \ Blinn has written the first important novel about the Gulf War, a blistering indictment of the American techno-military machine. It's a picture-perfect portrait of the Gulf War and the generation that fought it.\ \ \
