HOW TO DODGE A CANNONBALL is a performative book with a showy, theatrical, outsized personality that it tries hard to disguise under an intentionally grubby Civil War patina.

Its main character, a lowly private with experience in both the blue and gray camps, is a “flag-twirler,” whose only apparent skill outside of prevarication is mastery of an abstruse set of maneuvers by which a flag can be spun. (There is, of course, a fair amount of skill in this, which is likely on display at halftime of your local high school football game, but author Dennard Dayle’s earnest narrator takes it to the most baroque extreme.) Like juggling, acrobatics and humorous flash fiction, there’s no point in such a thing if you can’t do it in front of an admiring audience.

"Dayle gives readers a good amount to chew on, and enough of it makes sense to propel them forward. His prose operates like a firecracker spitting out sparks --- brilliant, effusive and wayward."

There is nothing bad or sinful or wrong about wanting attention and putting on a good show (if there is, I am no doubt going to Hell). And if you set out to write seriously performative fiction about the American past, the Civil War is certainly the way to go. You can’t go to Fort Sumter, Fredericksburg or Gettysburg, and not shake the feeling that these conflicts were placed in these out-of-the-way corners of America for pure stagecraft. The last battle even took place in a theater, with an actor taking the role of the lead villain. Dayle has his narrator twirl his flag for Lee and Longstreet, and then puts him at the center of the charge up Cemetery Ridge. Outside of maybe Mount Suribachi, there isn’t a more picturesque battle in the whole of the American Story.

What follows, however, lies more in the field of satire --- not the battles of the Civil War, but its underlying philosophies and manners. Dayle puts his soi-disant Confederate hero into a Union freedman regiment peopled entirely by eccentrics, which has the less-than-salutary outcome of zeroing out the plot and the narrative, or anything adjacent to that. This is not to say that the book is not well-written; Dayle’s felicity with the language is evident. And this is not to say that it is not at least intermittently funny. It certainly is, though it is not quite as funny as it intends to be.

But since HOW TO DODGE A CANNONBALL is working as a satire --- particularly as a literary satire --- plot and narrative are mostly beside the point anyway, and humor is more of an add-on. The purpose of satire at this high level is more interrogatory than anything else. The question here is precisely what is being interrogated at any given time. There are certainly racial and gender issues, but mostly Dayle is interrogating the idea of America itself. Does democracy work? Is the idea of American progress a chimera? What do you do when everyone around you is going mad?

Dayle gives readers a good amount to chew on, and enough of it makes sense to propel them forward. His prose operates like a firecracker spitting out sparks --- brilliant, effusive and wayward. But it is the waywardness that predominates, the sense that the whole enterprise is an out-of-control downhill ride that is going to end in some kind of disaster. I wouldn’t call HOW TO DODGE A CANNONBALL a disaster itself, but its essential eccentricity doesn’t lead anywhere.