Volume 19, Number 5 · October 5, 1972
Plunging into Life
By Roger Sale
Captain Blackman
by John A. Williams
Doubleday, 336 pp., $6.95
The Car Thief
by Theodore Weesner
Random House, 370 pp., $6.95
The Needle's Eye
by Margaret Drabble
Knopf, 369 pp., $6.95
By all rights, John A. Williams's Captain Blackman should have been much worse than it is. Its method is documentary, its aim is consciousness raising, not the loftiest of fictional ways and goals. Williams has, apparently, gone over every inch of ground where, at any time in American history, black soldiers have fought. As he did so, he tried to imagine not only the men he knew had been there but also a binding single figure, a soldier named Abraham Blackman, who fought in all the battles, from Lexington to New Orleans to Petersburg to Fort Sill in the Indian wars, to San Juan Hill, to France, Spain, Italy, Korea, and Vietnam. As the novel opens Blackman is wounded in Vietnam trying to shield some of his company from slaughter, and the rest is his dreams and hallucinations of his role in all the earlier battles.
Review, 4284 words
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