In his curiously circular first novel, Travis Nichols, author of the recently published prose poetry collection "Iowa," refreshes the epistolary tale. "Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder" is structured as a series of more than 100 letters, each beginning "Dear Luddie." Who's writing the letters? The grandson of a bombardier shot down by the Nazis in December 1944 and saved by a Polish woman (yes, Luddie). The narrator conjures up an intimate relationship with this stranger from a small black-and-white photograph with her name and street written in black ink, and from fragments of the bombardier's stories. "I want to be the correspondent between the past and the present," he tells her.
The narrator, 24, his girlfriend Bernadette, and the bombardier, now 84, travel from the Midwest to Poland, searching for the place where the bombardier crash-landed, and for Luddie. Nichols pulls the readers into their quest with breathtaking immediacy, despite his complicated, refracted plot.
Two questions are central to this search across time and continents: What makes history? What makes a story? The letters to Luddie are chockablock with invented and remembered tales. In one passage, the narrator imagines the invention of the B-17, the Flying Fortress his grandfather flew in, and the moment in December 1944 when the bomb-bay door opened and thousand-pound bombs were released. The plane's crew watched the Old World burn, and sang an Air Force song of the day, "Off we go, into the wild blue yonder."
Nichols uses repetition for emphasis throughout (at one point he refers to "Our story, Luddie. Our big, important story. Our clear story. Our not confused story"). This grows tedious at times. But Nichols' ravishing language saves him. The bombardier "has a clear voice, like a silver light emanating from a fountain pen." Bernadette's beauty, the narrator writes, "has crippled me to the point of near abstraction."
At times the narrator seems terribly off (because his history teacher called Berlin "the Bear City of the Old World," he envisions American bombs wiping out a large population of bears in 1944). But he's clear about his own misinterpretations and confusions, as he seeks the truth of what happened and what it means.
This is a novel about war and remembrance, about passing the story from one generation to another. On those counts Nichols gets it right. Although sometimes unpolished, "Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder" is both original and haunting.
Jane Ciabattari is a regular contributor to npr.org and the Daily Beast, and author of the short story collection "Stealing the Fire." She is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
