Volume 26, Number 12 · July 19, 1979
Feeding on Fantasy
By Thomas R. Edwards
Going After Cacciato
by Tim O'Brien
Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 338 pp., $8.95
Incandescence
by Craig Nova
Harper & Row, 312 pp., $9.95
Mulligan Stew
by Gilbert Sorrentino
Grove Press, 445 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Toward its end, Going After Cacciato quotes from Yeats's 'Meditations in Time of Civil War'—'We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart's grown brutal from the fare.' The words are said in a fantasy-scene, by a character who exists only in another character's mind, and it seems an apt motto for a novel about private dreaming in the midst of the public disaster of Vietnam. Yeats's troubled perception that the imagination may be implicated in a reality of violence and terror helps to explain why postwar moods, in fiction and life, are so inevitably moods of disenchantment.
Review, 3205 words
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