Volume 34, Number 21 & 22 · January 21, 1988
All-American Novels
By Robert Towers
Paco's Story
by Larry Heinemann
Penguin, 210 pp., $4.50 (paper)
That Night
by Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 184 pp., $14.95
Cigarettes
by Harry Mathews
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 292 pp., $17.95
The judges of literary prizes probably feel the need for originality almost as strongly as the writers whom they assess. In a year that produced major new works by Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, a notable collection of stories by Richard Ford, and a favorably reviewed best-seller by Gail Godwin, the judges of the National Book Award for Fiction went well out of their way to avoid the obvious and instead bestowed their wreath upon a novel that received some attention when it appeared but had not, so far as I know, attracted much of a following in the subsequent months. The discovery of an almost unknown work of great merit would indeed be a glorious thing—and a deserved rebuke to those editors and reviewers who had failed to do it timely justice. Is such the case with Paco's Story, a second novel by Larry Heinemann which has as its subject the Vietnam War and its consequences for one of the 'grunts' who served in it?
Review, 3192 words
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