SOURCE: “Dying for Happiness,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 1996, p. 25.

In the following review, Miller describes the appeal of Škvorecký's The Bride of Texas.

War, as William Tecumseh Sherman once famously observed, is hell. And just as the predicament of the damned has inspired generations of poets, so the literary appeal of war endures, with the tender, melancholy First World War novels of Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker currently battling for window-space against rather blunter reminiscences. Our appetite for such books may seem ghoulish, but perhaps it stems from a perverse nostalgia. One does not have to be a disciple of Jean Baudrillard to have noticed how advanced military technology and glib media saturation have made recent conflicts appear—at least to the comfortable civilian observer—distant, undramatic and without moral significance. Perhaps war is not the unique crucible of human folly and virtue that it...