Volume 26, Number 2 · February 22, 1979
Love and War
By Roger Sale
The Short-Timers
by Gustav Hasford
Harper & Row, 154 pp., $8.95
Hunt
by A. Alvarez
Simon & Schuster, 287 pp., $9.95
Dubin's Lives
by Bernard Malamud
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 362 pp., $10.00
There must be a way to write a good novel about Americans in the Vietnam war, but the authors of the three or four I have read have not found it. The sad fact about Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers is that its way of failing isn't very interesting. If any one person's experience of the war ranged from the shapeless to the chaotic, to write a shapeless and chaotic novel just won't work. The Short-Timers has a central figure, and we see only what he can see, but neither he nor Hasford has a point of view. Everything just happens. Joker goes to Parris Island, writes for Leatherneck, goes to Da Nang, he and Rafter Man go to Hue right after the Tet Offensive. Joker then goes to Khe Sanh, and later goes on patrol with his pals Cowboy and Alice and New Guy and some others. Most of them get killed.
Review, 2149 words
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