I am working on a review of Nick Arvin’s novel Articles of War, but I thought I would share some of his prose with you as a teaser. Here is one of my favorite passages. It describes the main character’s reaction as he sails for Europe and World War II and in the process sees the ocean for the first time:
On a cloudless day, with the horizon in all directions, it appeared they had arrived into the center of eternity. At night it would have been easy to believe that the innumerable stars themselves, not the ship, were swaying. Below him, the wave tips caught the moonlight and winked with patters of a complex intelligence. By day the waves carved countless, relentless, boundless sculptural forms, and the water acquired every conceivable shade from black to white and blue to green and, lit by the fires of sunset or the embers of sunrise, violet to scarlet to gold to mud to orange.
Makes this Midwesterner want to see the ocean . . .