"The Coldest Night," by Robert Olmstead He wore new shoes and they were stiff and still wore a store shine. He is Henry Childs, grandson and nephew to characters in other novels by Robert Olmstead, and he is on his way to his sweetheart's high school graduation. She is the daughter of a town judge, far above Henry's working-class station but a girl who seems to return his love. Notice in that sentence the no-rush gait, the unadorned yet unambiguous description, the resonant alliteration. Here is a boy unused to dressing up, uncomfortable with formality. It's a tiny detail, perhaps a disposable one, yet this is the kind of sentence that warms "The Coldest Night" and makes you wonder if Olmstead was meant to be a poet. But Olmstead is a novelist, and a very good one. The title of his new work refers to many things, both literal and metaphorical, but most explicitly to a handful of horrific evenings in 1950, during the Korean War, when the United States fought the Chinese in temperatures plunging to 30 below. Henry, only 17, has lied about his age. The relationship with the high school girl has ended violently - a rich judge doesn't need a poor fool for a son-in-law - and so Henry has fled to the Marines. He has a hazy sense of joining something eternal and beyond his command. He's heard the stories of his grandfather, who fought in the Civil War, and his uncle, who led a group of soldiers searching for Pancho Villa in Mexico (see Olmstead's novels "Coal Black Horse" and "Far Bright Star"). Henry broods: "How shallow his history and yet how complex the threads of memory." He isn't anxious about dying - maybe even longs for it - but plagued by insecurities and sensitivities, he dreads coming up short, failing to weave an enduring thread into his family's collective memory. "I'm not nobody," he's forced to remind himself, thus revealing his mind's default setting. Though Olmstead's evocations of battle­field horrors can be stirring, it's his depiction of war's less monstrous aspects - the continuous repositioning of troops and reshuffling of strongholds, the ceaseless anticipation of surprise attacks, the unmitigated exhaustion - that steadily unsettles. "He could not bear how long this forever moment as he waited and waited for what he knew was coming," Olmstead writes. He wanted to rest and wondered if they wanted to rest too. These lines lend a humanity to war that descriptions of guts and gore alone cannot. The small faults in "The Coldest Night" exist in spaces that shadow the book's much larger successes. In rare instances, an Olmstead sentence tumbles into self-parodic affectation: "The pools of blood were shockingly crimson on the white snow in the yellow light of the bluing sky." And though it happens infrequently, he's also capable of delivering bald, untrusting explanations of his protagonist's trajectory. "There was something new and very dangerous inside him," the narrator tells us. There was nothing that mattered to him. There was nothing he needed. He would live on what remained. This under­mines Olmstead's sketch of Henry, who otherwise can't comprehend his ambiguous and transmuting desires. In the course of one terrible year, his body, mind and heart are shattered by the savageries of love and war. Which, "The Coldest Night" asks, is worse? Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of the Sunday Review section of The Times.