Volume 25, Number 7 · May 4, 1978
Something About a Soldier
By Thomas R. Edwards
Whistle
by James Jones
Delacorte, 457 pp., $10.95
James Jones may have been the last prominent American novelist to suppose that fiction should be a virtually unmediated presentation of life, that material counts for more than craft. Such an idea is hardly a national characteristic, as Defoe, Balzac, and Tolstoy remind us, but it once seemed especially well suited to the American yearning for direct encounters with reality, unobstructed by European social, cultural, or linguistic forms. And if the American writer could not manage stylistic invisibility, he could at least write badly, with a kind of belligerent indifference to grace of form and words—the sort of thing that Hemingway scoffed at in Torrents of Spring.
Review, 2207 words
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