Notable Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies

"His restless body, which never spared itself in sport or danger, was destined to give him one last proud gallop at the end." That fugitive entry from F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks characterized his fellow Princetonian Hobey Baker, a man who seemed to have been written rather than born. He was blond, handsome, wealthy, the ultimate preppy more than two generations before the word was coined. In his college days (circa 1912) he led Princeton's football and hockey teams, dazzled classmates and debutantes, then when war came impulsively joined the celebrated flyers of the Lafayette Escadrille. When a headline later reported "HOBEY" BAKER, STAR OF GRIDIRON, IS NOW AN AMERICAN "ACE," no one was surprised. The astonishment came in France about a month after the shooting had ended. Baker, his orders home tucked in his tunic, took a repaired Spad up for a test flight. It crashed, and "the finest damn flier in the air," as his fellow aviators called him, entered the record books for the final time: the last man in his squadron to be killed.

First Novelist Goodman fictionalizes this authentic American romance from its heady undergraduate days to the mournful playing of Nearer, My God, to Thee in a rainy French graveyard. In the process he anatomizes the fatal innocence that accepted the conflict over there as an extension of the field and the rink. Goodman's debt to The Great Gatsby is manifest: his narrator, Jeb Runcible, regards his classmate much as Nick Carraway viewed Jay Gatsby. But the author's voice is his own, and as Jeb becomes progressively disenchanted, the golden pilot goes into a nose dive, changing from superhero in goggles to another classic American archetype: the perennial juvenile. Whole histories of the Lost Generation have revealed less; this is a novel that uses adventure to disguise a subtext of apprehension and rue.