Even though Glass pays homage to certain qualities of war fiction that we are familiar with, such as boot camp degradation and the terrors of front line battle, the novel adds layers of surrealism that nearly reinvent the genre. Love conquers all it settles for, go ahead be a good guy and apologize if that's what she wants, you get big shot of painkiller in return. Janowski is never really sober beyond the half-drunk hangovers that bring him to his job, where he usually falls asleep at his workbench. His perceptions are borderline psychotic at times. The only way you knew it wasn't TV was you could smell things.
Chapman accomplishes several interesting feats in the opening section of the novel.
Not only do we fully appreciate the bottoming out that leads VJ to the recruiting office, but we also begin to sense the underlying cultural dysfunction which produces the hostile and somewhat clueless individuals who are ripe for military indoctrination. Not that Janowski is a nitwit by any means. The character of VJ never completely disappears from the story, but in the subsequent sections of Glass Chapman opens his authorial lens to a wider presentation of the war. We see the Gulf War filtered through other voices and perspectives, cross-cutting between the battlefield and the homefront, casual observers and angry protesters, as well as media monoliths like CNN and network television. We also see the devastation wrought upon Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians and soldiers, whom Chapman portrays vividly in plaintive vignettes.