Volume 38, Number 14 · August 15, 1991
Adventurers
By Thomas R. Edwards
SIRO
by David Ignatius
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 465 pp., $19.95
A Soldier of the Great War
by Mark Helprin
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 792 pp., $24.95
The novels considered here are very different in manner and effect, but their authors have something in common. David Ignatius and Mark Helprin seem to be about the same age (fortysomething), studied at Harvard and Oxbridge, and have seen more of the world than most of us have. Ignatius was The Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Helprin a merchant seaman, a member of the Israeli armed forces, and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. In writing about modern war or its equivalent, both rework familiar fictional forms, Ignatius the spy thriller and Helprin the intellectual Bildungsroman. Both seem to aspire to broad readership, and both write at greater length than would seem to be required, as has now become commonplace.
Review, 2609 words
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