Phil Klay's New 'Missionaries' Is An Ambitious Novel Of Ideas

In 2014, Phil Klay released Redeployment, a collection of swift-talking stories emerging from — though not based on — his service in the Iraq War, to rapturous acclaim. He won the National Book Award, received uniformly glowing reviews, and earned frequent claims that Redeployment would be to Iraq what Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried has become to Vietnam. No small amount of pressure to put on an emerging writer, excellent though that writer may be.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that , Klay's thorough, forceful, and ambitious first novel, took him six more years to complete. It is slightly more surprising, and entirely admirable, that represents a major stylistic shift from , in that it is, quite explicitly, a novel of ideas. Through fiction, Klay sets out to introduce readers to the system of counterterrorist warfare the United States military has developed and exported worldwide, from Colombia, where much of the novel takes place, to the Middle East and beyond. is a portrait of a gigantic, porous, mutable, and seemingly mission-less war — and, as such, is gigantic and mutable itself, though Klay never loses sight of his goal. As a result, the novel's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: It tries to be as all-encompassing as its subject.