SOURCE: "Handing on Hate," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4691, February 26, 1993, p. 20.

[In the following excerpt, Cunningham faults Brady's presentation of a white child as a slave during the post-Civil War era as unconvincing and historically inaccurate.]

Theory of War is the grim story of how one Irish-American, called Jonathan Carrick, became morally and spiritually deformed, as he wrestled for mere survival in awful pioneering circumstances in the period after the American Civil War, and how he came to pass on his deformities to his descendants.

In the hands of Carrick's narrating granddaughter—who researches her family history from what is, for this fiction, a characteristically portentous wheelchair—the violence of his struggles is an allegory of human existence in general, but more feelingly of American humanity in particular.

The most momentous thing about young Carrick is that he is sold into what his narrator thinks of as...