Redeployment by Phil Klay
Published 2014 · 240 pages · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, War Fiction, Short Stories, Contemporary Fiction
How hard is Redeployment to read?
Redeployment scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Klay's prose stays plain but saturates itself with military acronyms and jargon — FRAGO, MEDEVAC, OIF, IED, EOD — that function like a foreign vocabulary for civilian readers even though the surrounding sentences are simple. Closer to The Great Gatsby's polished accessibility (45) than to anything genuinely obscure, but the acronym density pushes it a notch higher.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Most stories favor short, declarative sentences in the tradition of Hemingway's war fiction, closer to 1984's directness (35) than to Fitzgerald's rhythmic balance (52). A few stories, notably 'Prayer in the Furnace,' stretch into longer, more clause-heavy sentences when the material turns explicitly theological.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- The stories stay grounded in concrete incident — a firefight, a body bag, a baseball diamond built out of reconstruction funds — but several narrators (the chaplain, the psy-ops soldier) wrestle openly with guilt, faith, and the ethics of killing. Lands near The Great Gatsby's social observation (58) rather than Brothers Karamazov's sustained philosophical argument (75).
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Each story compresses a specific job's procedural detail — mortuary affairs paperwork, artillery kill-probability math, State Department requisition forms — into a short span, demanding readers absorb an entire subculture's vocabulary and logic in twenty pages. Denser than Gatsby's compressed clarity (48), short of Lolita's constant textural richness (65).
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Klay's narrators frequently undercut or withhold their own trauma — flat affect standing in for horror the prose refuses to name outright — putting the burden of inference on the reader much as Nick Carraway's bias does in Gatsby (65), though these narrators are more overtly evasive than biased.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Recurring images — dogs, fire, bodies processed like inventory — carry thematic weight, but Klay's realism keeps most of the writing literal rather than allegorical. Closer to To Kill a Mockingbird's single controlling image (45) than to Gatsby's sustained symbolic architecture (75).
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- 'Money as a Weapons System' runs on bureaucratic absurdity — a girls' baseball league as counterinsurgency strategy — and several stories use gallows humor to hold two incompatible truths at once. Sits between Moby-Dick's tragicomic asides (45) and Gatsby's sustained double vision (70).
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- Stories rarely resolve into catharsis — the chaplain's crisis of faith, the veteran's stalled reintegration — but Klay generally lets readers know what happened even when meaning stays unsettled, closer to Beloved's haunting-but-resolved structure (40) than to 2666's outright unsolved mysteries (92).
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- As a collection of twelve stand-alone first-person stories, each narrated by a different veteran or civilian across a different job and register, the book's difficulty comes from range rather than nonlinearity — each individual story stays close to linear, more like Gatsby's simple retrospection (55) scaled down, than Midnight's Children's interwoven timelines (68).
How Redeployment is regarded
Redeployment holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.