Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Clancy, Tom - Christopher Buckley (review date 2 October 1994)

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Christopher Buckley (review date 2 October 1994)

SOURCE: "Megabashing Japan," in New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1994, pp. 28-9.

[Below, Buckley offers an unfavorable review of Debt of Honor.]

Somewhere, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James's books, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up." Debt of Honor, the eighth novel in Tom Clancy's oeuvre, is, at 766 pages, a herniating experience. Things don't really start to happen until about halfway through this book, by which time most authors, including even some turgid Russian novelists, are finished with theirs. But Tom Clancy must be understood in a broader context, not as a mere writer of gizmo-thrillers, destroyer of forests, but as an economic phenomenon. What are his editors—assuming they even exist; his books feel as if they go by modem from Mr. Clancy's computer directly to the printers—supposed to do? Tell him to cut? "You tell him it's...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Walter Isaacson (review date 11 August 1986)
   2. Anthony Hyde (review date 26 July 1987)
   3. Ross Thomas (review date 2 August 1987)
   4. Robert Lekachman (review date 31 July 1988)
   5. Ross Thomas (review date 13 August 1989)
   6. David Wise (review date 13 August 1989)
   7. Elliott Abrams (review date 16 August 1989)
   8. Morton Kondracke (review date 28 July 1991)
   9. Bob Shacochis (review date 4 August 1991)
   10. Louis Menand (review date 16 September 1991)
   11. William F. Ryan (essay date Winter 1993)
   12. G. Gordon Liddy (review date 22 August 1993)
   13. Walter L. Hixson (essay date Fall 1993)
   14. John Calvin Batchelor (review date 21 August 1994)
   15. John Lehman (review date 2 September 1994)
   16. Christopher Buckley (review date 2 October 1994)
   17. Michael R. Beschloss (review date 18 August 1996)
   18. Paul Dean (review date 25 August 1996)
   19. Christopher Hitchens (review date 14 November 1996)
   20. Helen S. Garson (essay date 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Tom Clancy