War Games

War Games is a comic, ensemble novel set in the mid-sixties at a small teacher's college in central New York state. It follows the efforts of Ed Peschke to come to terms with setbacks to both his writing and academic careers in a slowly changing environment. His life is being intruded upon by his own expectations and a rapidly changing department, nation, and world. One of the intrusions is Bill Parkin, a second writer, who is hired as competition for Peschke and whose early murder sets off a competition between Peschke and a third fiction writer, Sara Evans, and inquiries into meaning and the functions of art. In a countermove to their ambitions are the hopes of Abe and Julia Hawk to turn the college into something academically respectable, knowing that, in doing so, they have had to submit and may yet submit to underhanded maneuvering. Sara's husband, who is a business executive, brings into this evolving picture of small-town academia glimpses of the business world that he is part of. Other minor characters give density to the scope of the novel's four "worlds" the academic, the literary, the domestic, and the business granting variety to what is essentially a short novel, whose own perspective, as Peschke explains late in the work, is either provisional or absurd.

In realizing its basic "novel of manners," War Games goes back to Henry Fielding's idea of the novel as "an epic in prose." Like books in an epic or episodes in a serial, its twelve chapters are essentially self-contained modular units. There are twelve such units two of which focus on each of six characters in a cultural perspective that moves from totally male (1-4) to mixed (5-8) to totally female (9-12). Like the academics whose lives it traces, the novel is principally thought and talk rather than action and competition and conflict rather than cooperation, and, yet, some progress appears to have occurred by the work's end. Except for the dead Parkin, the main characters are better off than when the narrative started and some even have gained better knowledge of themselves, though throughout the book self-deception is considerable.