Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wolff, Tobias - Valentine Cunningham (review date 14 March 1975)

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Valentine Cunningham (review date 14 March 1975)

SOURCE: Cunningham, Valentine. “The Weight of War.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 3810 (14 March 1975): 269.

[In the following excerpt, Cunningham accuses Wolff of treating the horrors of war lightly in Ugly Rumours.]

Ugly Rumours is less long, more comfortable to read, and a more shaped fiction: significantly, a lot of it takes place away from combat zones. Two buddies, the eternal fixer Woermer and the bear-like Grubbs, are followed through officer-training to a cushy number Woermer and his chums have fixed up in a safe-ish Vietnam village. There their careers and attitudes develop and diverge, until, back in the United States, they will never meet again. Savage ironies are duly observed, and in particular cinema-bred heroics are bloodily shot down. And the frightening things of Vietnam—the army of limbless veterans abandoned to their fates by the South Vietnamese...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Valentine Cunningham (review date 14 March 1975)
   2. Bruce Allen (review date spring 1982)
   3. Richard Orodenker and Welch D. Everman (review date June 1982)
   4. Dean Flower (review date summer 1982)
   5. Bruce Allen (review date 7 June 1985)
   6. Thomas DePietro (review date autumn 1986)
   7. Linda Taylor (review date 6-12 November 1987)
   8. Richard Eder (review date 8 January 1989)
   9. Jeff Danziger (review date 16 February 1989)
   10. Geoff Dyer (review date 28 April 1989)
   11. John Clute (review date 12-18 May 1989)
   12. John Rechy (review date 5 November 1989)
   13. Peter J. Bailey (essay date summer 1991)
   14. John F. Desmond (essay date 14 May 1994)
   15. Richard Eder (review date 16 October 1994)
   16. Tobias Wolff and Nicholas A. Basbanes (interview date 24 October 1994)
   17. James Hannah (essay date 21 November 1994)
   18. Amanda Hopkinson (review date 9 December 1994)
   19. Michael Wood (review date 23 December 1994)
   20. Michael O. Garvey (review date 19 May 1995)
   21. Pat C. Hoy II (review date summer 1995)
   22. Jay Rogoff (review date summer 1996)
   23. James Hannah (essay date 1996)
   24. James Hannah (essay date 1996)
   25. Erin McGraw (review date summer 1997)
   26. Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Glass (interview date July 1997)
   27. Daniel D. Challener (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright