In 1918 the popular American religious writer Winifried Kirkland observed that World War I had created “New Death”; it had changed the ways death occurred, and how it would be experienced by its victims and those close to them. This change had deeply affected America, Kirkland argued; death was newly pervasive and yet often strangely intangible, rendering older modes of responding to death outdated and ineffective. Pearl James recovers this forgotten title to make similar assertions in her absorbing new study of US modernist fiction, which sits alongside important recent studies of cultures of World War I-era American memory and memorial by Steven Trout and Lisa Budreau. But what sets The New Death apart is its focus on modernist novels – The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner's Sartoris – to uncover the ways that the experimental prose and new types of masculine identity so often associated with these texts were inextricable from this new culture of death.

The New Death therefore cuts against arguments that the USA's experience of World War I was belated, brief, and ultimately less consequential to the national consciousness than those of the Civil War, World War II, or the Vietnam War. Instead, James contends that the physical and psychological shocks of “new death” formed a pervasive structural context for modernism – shocks that often found expression through telling omissions or residual traces rather than in moments of explicit violence. This is most fully explored in the chapter on The Great Gatsby, which reads the veteran Nick as a narrator whose narrative circumlocutions, repetitive tendencies, and hazy memory – long acclaimed as integral components of the novel's stylistic brilliance – mark him as a victim of war trauma. Moreover, the book's obsession with careless driving and traffic accidents becomes a way of restaging the war's mechanized, startling, and bodily devastating modes of death. James also returns to the novel's drafts, which demonstrate how often Fitzgerald removed explicit references to the war, yet managed to retain its structuring force. (In early versions, for example, Nick was known as “dud,” the colloquial term for unexploded ordnance.)

James's book also contends that several of these novels displace the most shattering physical and psychological effects of the new death onto female characters. US culture was deeply reluctant to represent the severely injured male body, a reticence which shunted the war's violence into Myrtle Wilson's injuries in The Great Gatsby, or into Catherine Barkley's slow, unnecessary, and painful death in A Farewell to Arms. Intriguingly, James also finds this fundamentally misogynistic displacement at work in Willa Cather's One of Ours – a reason this novel has proven stubbornly resistant to feminist recuperation. The most dystopic and catastrophic effects of modern war register not in the novel's battle scenes, but in the scenes in Nebraska, and particularly through the characterization of Enid, the protagonist Claude Wheeler's wife. She embodies war's “man-eating modernity, its reduction of heroic manliness to the futile gestures that precede mechanized slaughter”; her all-round competence (she is a skilled driver and missionary volunteer) and sexual coolness emasculate Claude in a way that his death going “over the top” in France can only partly alleviate (45). James's insightful reading adds to the recent spike of critical interest in this novel, which is becoming central to the American canon of war literature precisely for the kinds of aesthetic incompatibility, heroic over-idealization, and tortured gender politics that many critics excoriated it for on its initial release.

Also welcome was her reading of the often overlooked Faulkner novel Sartoris, the first to be set in his trademark fictitious Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. James's insight is that the returning aviator Bayard Sartoris struggles not merely with the familiarly Faulkneresque burden of a code of masculinity handed to him by the Civil War-era South, but also with the absence of his brother's body – an absence which makes traditional rituals of mourning impossible. This absence was felt by thousands of Americans, and informed one of the most contentious features of the war's aftermath – whether American dead would be repatriated to be buried in their home communities, or would instead remain in military cemeteries in Europe. Having the wrong language and no tangible object to mourn renders Bayard helplessly unable to narrate his story of loss, which contorts the narrative structure into its prototypically modernist characteristics of elliptical and discontinuous prose.

Readers frustrated by the scattershot feel of many recent wide-ranging analyses of American culture in the wake of World War I will appreciate James's study, which excels at extended, elegant, and rewarding close readings of individual novels. This inevitably means that there are gaps in her account of this modernist culture of new death – for example, how (or whether) its strategies of omission and displacement related to moments when the representation of violence against the male body was explicit, such as in the memoirs and fiction of the war by veterans such as Thomas Boyd, Hervey Allen, and Laurence Stallings. It is also reticent on how the racial and ethnic politics of the war shaped this aesthetic tradition, an issue which informs recent work by Keith Gandal and Jennifer James. Nonetheless, The New Death contains some of the finest readings available on how the war shaped American modernist prose, which is no small achievement.