HOW TO DODGE A CANNONBALL

Imagine a post-millennial trickster spin on The Red Badge of Courage only with broader landscapes, complex racial dynamics, and corrosive humor.

Call him Anders. He’s a tall, pale teenage naif who gets so swept up in the maelstrom of the Civil War that by 1863, he’s been a regimental flag bearer for both the Union and Confederate armies before barely surviving the Yankees’ rout at Gettysburg and staggering into an all-Black Union regiment. With the craftiness he’s had to depend on since leaving behind his abusive mother, Anders blends in with his new platoon with stolen blue duds and a claim to being an octoroon (i.e. mixed race). The Black troopers skeptically indulge this white-boy straggler’s story and take him in as one of their own—and they are as motley a crew as can be imagined in anybody’s army. There’s Corporal Tobias Gleason, a playwright specializing in what he calls “speculative theater” about “The American Future.” Also notable among Anders’ new compatriots are Joaquin Geoffroy, a Haitian-born double agent embedded among African American soldiers “to inspire greater brutality against their white countrymen,” an “eternally frowning black giant” named Mole, and Thomas, a grouchy freed slave with ongoing, unresolved grievances against God (and just about everything else). There’s another teenager in the regiment, a bugler named Petey, who’s as “light” in skin color as Anders and is just as vague about his true origins. With a captured, duplicitous white arms dealer named Slade Jefferson in tow, Anders and his adopted brothers-in-arms embark on a perilous, sometimes-savage journey that takes them to a New York City whose streets are stained with Black blood from the draft riots. Then Gleason is emboldened to lead the wayward regiment to San Valentin, a Nevada settlement offering a prototype of a freer, more equitable America “unstained by cotton.” Grand dreams, inflated egos, and cruel twists of fate are often the stuff of great satires and this first novel by Dayle evokes such classic accounts of the human condition in conflict as Candide, Catch-22, and at least a couple of books by Evelyn Waugh.

Historical burlesque as lively in invention as it is ingenious in execution.