I must admit, it's been some time since I felt compelled to compulsively read a book to completion. I finish nearly every book I begin, but it often takes some mental stamina, and I've been finding it difficult to enjoy many books all the way through. It saddens me. But it provides opportunity for standouts like The Barracks Thief.
Its brevity, I think, is a factor, and it seems stories with which I can spend one pleasant night are often my favorites. Train Dreams, Notes from Underground, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Metamorphosis, The Mist are all favorites that I finished in one or two sittings. I think the novella is the perfect length. It can take enough time to get you invested without succumbing to plodding detail, or numbing exposition. I still love short stories and gargantuan epics or sprawling tangential novels. I just think I've determined my Goldilocks zone for fiction.
The other factor is, of course, that it's written by Tobias Wolff. There is a Catcher in the Rye aimlessness of youth quality to the story, but follows a few young men who enlist in the Army during the Vietnam war and find bonding, tragedy, and betrayal at Fort Bragg. These boys are preparing for a (perhaps brief) future of violence while letters and calls from home inform them that their pasts are missing, or gone.