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    War of the Encyclopaedists: A Novel
    War of the Encyclopaedists: A Novel
    War of the Encyclopaedists: A Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    War of the Encyclopaedists: A Novel

    Written by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite

    Narrated by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    “A captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) about two best friends as their post-grad lives diverge—one into liberal academia, the other into the American military occupation of Iraq.

    On a summer night in 2004, prepping for another blowout party in the arty Seattle enclave of Capitol Hill, Mickey Montauk has just learned that he won’t be joining his best friend, Halifax Corderoy, for grad school in Boston. Global events have intervened, and Mickey’s National Guard unit will soon deploy to Baghdad. But before he can make this stunning revelation, events spiral beyond their control. In the bleary-eyed dawn, Mickey and Hal glimpse their radically altered future, the start of a year that will transform them all.

    Months later, Mickey struggles to lead his platoon safely through an increasingly violent and confusing war. In Boston, Hal finds himself unable to play the game of intellectual one-upmanship with the ease of his new classmates. When Hal’s new roommate, Tricia, and ex-girlfriend, Mani, come between the best friends, Hal and Mickey find that cool irony and youthful self-regard cannot insulate them from the damages of love and conflict and the messiness of living. As Mickey and Hal’s lives move further away from their shared dream, they keep in touch by editing a Wikipedia article about themselves: absurd and hilarious updates that morph and deepen throughout the year, culminating in a document that is both devastatingly tragic and profoundly poetic.

    “One of the most revealing novels yet about the millennial generation” (Esquire), War of the Encyclopaedists beats with the energetic pulse of idealistic youth on the threshold of adult reality. It is the vital, urgent, and utterly absorbing lament of searching for meaning and hope in a fractured world: “A love story, a war story, and also a generational one, about coming of age in the time of Wikipedia and YouTube…darkly funny and absurd and terrifying at the same time” (The Wall Street Journal).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781442385771
    Author

    Christopher Robinson

    Christopher Robinson, a Boston University and Hunter College MFA graduate, is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review and McSweeney’s.

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    Reviews for War of the Encyclopaedists

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    • 4/5
      While this is a beautifully written book, it is not a compelling story. Mickey and Halifal became instant friends, partied together where they met a free spirit named Mani, and then are separated when Hal continues on the college in Boston while Mickey’s unit is called to Iraq. Mani is a tie that continues to bind them as she married Mickey for his benefits before he shipped off despite being in love with Hal, who she ends up with. Mickey has a short affair with Tricia in Iraq, but the war itself brings too many pressures on the couple. What is unique is that the men remain in some communication through a Wikipedia page they create and maintain throughout the story.
    • 5/5
      WAR OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS, by Christopher Robinson & Gavin Kovite.This novel is a fascinating experiment in co-writing that 'totally works,' as someone much younger than I might say. And that's probably a good way to begin, since I'm pretty sure ENCYCLOPAEDISTS is directed at a much younger audience than me. Full disclosure: I'm seventy-one, and this is a book about twenty-somethings, and it provided me with a great peek into their world in the early years of the twenty-first century. And it's a confusing one. Call this a guy-sorta BFF book, okay? Except I'm not really sure about the 'forever' part, because, in my experience, guys don't often maintain those early best friendships. The BFF is more of a gal-thing, I think. But I started to comment on the successfulness of the co-writer thing. I'm trying to think of the last time I read such a good book written by two people. I'm digging way back even, and all I can come up with right off the top of my head is Nordhoff and Hall's MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, and boy was that a long time ago! First published in the thirties, although I read it back in the sixties.Although I'm pretty sure grad student Halifax Corderoy and Army 1LT Mickey Montauk bear little resemblance to Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh, they are a couple of pretty engaging characters, and, even though their story takes place in 2004-2005 time frame, I chuckled my way through some of the 'guy things' in here, both civilian and military, that I remember from my own youthful years (civilian and military, as I've been both soldier [twice] and grad student) in the sixties and seventies. So yeah, many of the familiar 'rites of passage' I recognized: the drinking, the bonding by puking together, the solitary sex (the 'sock on the doorknob' cracked me up). It was the other stuff - video games, internet surfing, online porn, the casual sex and aimlessness - that I had trouble relating to. Wrong generation, obviously.What this book does best, I think, is to show the disconnect between the civilian populace (represented by Hal Corderoy and the girl, Mani) and the all-volunteer army (Montauk and the men in his unit). Mani, Hal's girlfriend and Mickey's wife (you'll have to read the book to get this), says it pretty well in a letter to Mickey, calling the Iraq conflict "this weirdly fake war" -"Nobody around here even thinks about it except to think how stupid it is, and how much they're embarrassed by it, and how much they hate Bush, of course."And therein lies the dramatic tension that binds this co-authored book together. Hal, blundering his way along as a grad school dropout, maybe in love with his best friend's wife. And Mickey, trying to deal with the dangerous realities of his deployment to Baghdad while still grappling with his feelings for Mani. The book is laid out in sections alternating between Boston and Baghdad's mean - and deadly - streets. And each section ends with a philosophical, often angry or irreverent Wikipedia entry for "The Encyclopaedists," a roundabout way for Hal and Mickey to keep in touch.This is quite a book. It really is. Politically probing, funny, tender, at times extremely moving. It paints a poignant picture of a generation enduring many of the normal rites of passage, sometimes marking time, other times moving forward - trying to figure out what comes next. And the biggest mystery is how two guys managed to write this great book together, how seamlessly it all fits together. That's one hell of a hat trick, ya know? And my hat is off to Robinson and Kovite. They may not turn out to be this century's Nordhoff and Hall, but then again ...? Very highly recommended. (Four and a half stars - I'd have given it five, but I'm just not quite the right generation.)