War Games

by Wright Morris

Written twenty years before it was first published in 1972, War Games features both black and charcoal-gray humor, whose characters and events are as unpredictable as they are absorbing--a book, in the author's words, "where the extremity of the bizarre is seen as the ultimate effort to change oneself, if not the world." At the center of the novel is the developing relationship between the protagonist, a fifty-three-year-old army colonel, and a Viennese immigrant whom he first knows as Mrs. Tabori and whose story he has learned through a dying amputee, Human Kopfman. Themes and characters that first appear in War Games reappear in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree . In the preface to this edition, Wright Morris describes the genesis of the book in 1951 and comments on its connections with his late " War Games may well prove to be the seedbed of much more in my fiction than I am aware, since it was the first turning of earth more than twenty years buried. My novels are linked in this manner, but sometimes at odds with the chronology of publication. In the absence of War Games , many clues to the fiction that followed were missing. . . . "[This novel] seems to me darkly somber, a book of interiors, dimly lighted streets, hallways and lobbies, with glimpses of objects and colors that emerge in subdued lighting. I'd like to think that my readers, both new and old, will find the world of the Colonel and Mrs. Tabori relevant to the one in which they are living."

164 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1978

About the author

Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
Morris won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision in 1956. His final novel, Plains Song won the American Book Award in 1981.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine if you will:

A teen hacks into a military computer thinking it's a game, but accidentally sets in motion the start of World War III.
The system can’t tell the difference between simulation and reality, so it preps a real nuclear launch.
To stop it, the kid has to teach the machine...that some games can’t be won.
____

Yeah, goddamn it, no; sadly, this is not the novelization or source material for the Matthew Broderick MASTERPIECE of cinema sharing the title. Turns out this actually has fuckall to do with war or games, either. In the place of those artistic constants (for a reason!), Wright Morris (wrong name order) provides a genuinely dread-inducing narrative of interpersonal power over self-narrative and the multiplicities of agenda involved anytime narrative constancy is threatened. It's a razorblade's corner pushed concave into skin, one-thousandth of a fraction north of a pressure's psi away from puncture and flood.

___

So, yeah, it wasn't shitty. But if Morris' Project X DOESN'T revolve around a USAF Airman assigned to care for chimpanzees used in a secret Air Force experiment clandestinely training killer pilotchimps? Well...for the sake of the planet (and sweet astrochimp Virgil)...just hope, by God, that it is.




*Real rating: 4.444444443. It is crucial in his canon, especially as it has an origin story that will reappear throughout Wright’s body (electric).