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

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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