RIP, Paul Fussell

Go, go at once and read (or re-read) Paul Fussell’s universally celebrated and INCREDIBLE The Great War and Modern Memory. If you like pairing odd books, try it with a side of Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson. Or, of course, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which is as good as anyone ever says it is, and resolutely unromantic, like all great war novels. NO, NO. Obviously, you want to read it alongside Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Pat Barker’s Regeneration! CHRIST, JUST GO READ ALL THE THINGS.

The Great War and Modern Memory is not one of those super-butch pure battle studies (no offense, and ❤ u, numerous super-butch pure battle studies). It’s literary criticism about the UNMAKING of the WORLD. Seriously, please, don’t miss it. For a weirder read, Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is ick-ily, uncomfortably funny, a little bit like the sporadically amusing Bobos in Paradise, but before hedge fund executives and Facebook engineers were coming to work wearing “hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot.”