Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder

Nichols takes the simple plot of a road trip and turns it upside down and sideways, with the structure more inter-esting than the content. The unnamed narrator writes a series of letters to a Polish woman named Luddie as the nar-rator takes his girlfriend and his grandfather back to the Polish village where “The Bombardier” as his grandfather was called was shot down during WWII, and where Luddie helped him survive. The three continually tell each other stories the narrator retells to Luddie. Nichols handles beautifully the hidden meanings in old family tales heard a hundred times, but suddenly seen in the light of the casual racism and sexism prevalent in the decades after the war. It's as though a set of nesting dolls exploded into thousands of puzzle pieces that won't quite fit together anymore. One way it seems like “the truth” and then another detail comes up in another story that changes that truth. Tightly structured, with many repetitive phrases serving as a choral backdrop to the action, the novel often reads like a piece of music that is wonderfully original. (May)