Review: Waiting for Eden

Elliot Ackerman continues to amaze. A decorated Marine who served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, a White House Fellow, journalist and 2017 National Book Award fiction finalist for Dark at the Crossing, Ackerman has lived most of his adult life in the murky shadows of modern warfare. His first novel, Green on Blue, captures the complexity of the Afghan War from the perspective of a war-orphaned village boy swept into the fight out of desperate poverty and vengeance. As a correspondent covering the Syrian conflict, Ackerman lived in Turkey, where he fleshed out Dark at the Crossing's story of an Arab-American's quest to cross Turkey's Syrian border to join the fight against Assad. A slight, meditative novel, Waiting for Eden, however, shifts Ackerman's focus back to the States and the postwar agony of a wounded soldier and his family. It's not about death or PTSD or politics, but rather, as the title suggests, it's about perhaps the most difficult aftermath of war trauma: waiting.

 

Narrated from the grave by a Marine killed in the same IED attack that left Eden Malcom an intermittently conscious, skin-torched, dismembered, vision- and hearing-compromised survivor, Waiting for Eden tells of his wife Mary's three-year bedside vigil holding on to the thread of life. Her refusal to take him off life-support alienates his siblings, who hold a symbolic memorial service and move on. Even the stoic nurses at the San Antonio VA hospital shudder to care for this patient: "Not alive, not dead, what it was didn't have a name... it was man suffering into the anlage of whatever came next." As Eden experiences mini-strokes, Mary can't let go. The narrator observes, "There was so little of him left, and the less of him there was, the more desperately she clung to it."

 

Ackerman's unusual choice of a dead comrade to narrate his spare tale allows for unobtrusive flashbacks fleshing out the history of Mary and Eden's life. We learn of his first deployment, their early dating and marriage, her desire for a child, his war-driven impotence and the narrator's brief affair that impregnates Mary. When Eden's condition deteriorates to the point where Mary is ready to let him go, his training in prisoner communication by coded taps opens a window of connection. She hesitates until it is clear that he is messaging her to "end, end, end"--the signal of a desire to "tap out." The narrator patiently waits for her decision to release his fellow Marine to the limbo of post-death "whiteness." What comes next is unknown. Waiting for Eden is a tight, intense story of loyalty, guilt and suffering that belies its brevity. Ackerman has crafted another prismatic window into the long-lasting agony of war. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.