Phil Klay's Missionaries

My review of Phil Klay’s novel Missionaries has been published at The Bulwark, a political and cultural journal that emerged out of the ashes of The Weekly Standard. Thanks to them for the chance to write the review! Klay is a former Marine and fiction writer whom I discovered recently through the work of Nick Ripatrazone. (Earlier this year I reviewed Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God in America Magazine, and shared further thoughts about the book on this blog.) Klay’s Redeployment, which won the National Book Award in 2014, is a collection of stories centered on the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The stories are shot through with the spiritual struggle of war, and Klay brings his Catholicism to bear on his fiction in a way that reminds me of Sushaku Endo or Graham Green—bracing, eloquently crafted, and respectful of the irreducible mysteries of our faith. Missionaries does much of the same, tracing these essential spiritual questions in the intertwined lives of several individuals involved in the American conflict in Colombia. Do read the book—it’s excellent.