I like Willa Cather's writing a ton. Especially "Death Comes to the Archbishop;" "Song of the Lark;" and "My Antonia." Plus a bunch of her short stories.I didn't enjoy this book very much while reading it. The book won a Pulitzer Prize, but I wasn't even aware of it; saw references in some of the other WWI stuff I read recently (here and here and here). The references were not flattering; Kennedy felt Cather didn't know much about the war, and that her writing glorified and romanticized the war in an outdated fashion.
So I was looking for faults and found them. Cather clearly hadn't the knowledge level of Shaara or Remarque regarding WWI. And I thought she was too hard on the small town Nebraska, and way too romantic about France.
Then the last five pages of the book wrapped up the entire thing beautifully and the entire thing made sense. She wasn't writing so much about the War as a type of individual and the way in which this type of individual responded to the War. It wasn't intended to be an "objective" or "comprehensive" look at the war, which functioned as a setting. One neat (and short) passage involves the protagonist visiting one of the local girls, Gladys Farmer, before heading off to France; marvelously poignant (she was one of a handful in the town that understood him, and vice versa); you can read it here.
And in that way the book works extremely well. And makes you kind of sad in the end.
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