Volume 46, Number 17 · November 4, 1999
War at the Top
By Whitney Balliett
Guard of Honor
by James Gould Cozzens
Modern Library, 614 pp., $24.95
Out of print since the Fifties, Guard of Honor won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1949, and, though nearly forgotten now, is, I have long thought, the best American novel about the Second World War—Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Harry Brown, Joseph Heller, Herman Wouk, John Horne Burns, and John Hersey notwithstanding. It is certainly the best of Cozzens's thirteen novels, which include the jejune Confusion (1924), published when he was a sophomore novelist-at-the-ready at Harvard; the skilled and increasingly mature trio of The Last Adam (1933), Men and Brethren (1936), and The Just and the Unjust (1942); his pompous and almost unreadable best seller, By Love Possessed (1957); and his last, the moribund Morning Noon and Night (1968).
Review, 3843 words
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