Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 22, 1994 TAG: 9405150122
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A generation and more after the Vietman War, novels on that theme are still being ground out. It is a literary itch become an obsession, and no amount of scribbling and scratching seems able to satisfy it.
All of which adds to the enigma of why Vietnam, for all the emotion it aroused, has not produced at least one novel approaching the great novels of World War II: Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" (the only thing of lasting value he's ever written) or James Jones "From Here to Eternity," to cite the best.
Finally, I think I know why.
"The Edge of Honor," though yet another short round, is an entertaining novel, particularly for veterans of the blue water navy, from P.T. Deuterman, a former navy captain who first novel, "Scorpion In the Sea," was well received.
Deuterman tells the story of Lt. Brian Holcomb, weapons officer on the John Bell Hood, who must get a good fitness report if he is to make lieutenant commander and guarantee his career. Part of Holcomb's problem, though he doesn't fully realize it, is the girl he left behind, his wife Maddie. His more immediate one is what to do about an increasingly serious drug problem on the Hood, a problem neither the skipper nor the exec seems to want to recognize.
The book is also a love story, of sorts. The true loves become more focused as the book goes on, and this is one of its strong points, although foreshadowings of the most obvious kinds give away all elements of surprise. Love is also the weak point; Deuterman's love affair with the trappings of navy life.
Every inspection, every briefing, every change of watch is recalled in loving detail, and almost all of it bogs down both the flow and development of the story. It also makes out that a seven-month deployment in what is normally a near totally safe tour is a particularly grim hardship. Marines, with a 13-month Vietnam tour, and even the army (with a year) will find it easy to sneer at that, particularly former enlisted men and their families.
"The Edge of Honor" also falls short because it is, with the exception of one hilarious scene involving an alligator, almost completely lacking in humor. In sum, a good technical story with well-defined characters is over-written but still entertaining. Yet, for the most part, others have done it better: Leib in "The Fire Dream," which parallels much of "The Edge of Honor" early on; Eyre's "Float," a brown water novel which, as long as it remains in Vietnam, is as good as any yet written; delVecchio's "13th Valley" or Webb's "Fields of Fire," to name several.
But "The Edge of Honor" convinces me also that the Vietnam novel parallelling Mailer or Jones, or just below them, Shaw's "The Young Lions" or Wouk's "Caine Mutiny" isn't going to appear. The reasons, I've concluded after reading dozens of them, is that there is nothing a Vietnam novel can say that will ever equal the non-fiction power of Michael Herr's "Dispatches," or even lesser works such as Perry Deane Young's "Two of the Missing."
Almost all of the non-fiction from World War II by Ernie Pyle, Hal Boyle, Richard Tregaskis, even John Hersey, has a cheer-leading, flag-waving note somewhere in it. It was left to the post-war novelists to tell the lasting story.
In the same sense, I think, the Vietnam story has already been told, and it has been told by the journalists and other non-fiction writers. I hope Deuterman and others will keep trying, and I trust their work will be met with pleasure and appreciation, but don't look for the definitive work on Vietnam to come from a novelist.
Robert Hilldrup, a former army draftee, is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB