[In the following unfavorable review, the critic assesses Gallo's literary style and development of characters in With the Victors.]

[In With the Victors] Max Gallo's Marco Naldi is one of those superheroes, like Robert Briffault's Julien Bern or Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd, who leads a panoramic life on the stage of history. He meets world leaders in person, and makes the scene of big political happenings. Naldi starts as a lieutenant in the Arditi after Caporetto, and joins the fascist movement when the war is over. He becomes an aide to Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Ciano, specializing in press relations. These include Merry Groves, of The New York Times ("a very dark young woman with short hair curling over her forehead and a face full of laughter"). Also Maud Kaufman, a Trotskyite journalist married to a Stalinist, by whom Naldi has a son. And Elizabeth Loubet, an undercover media maid, whom our hero finally marries. Meanwhile, Naldi is on the spot wherever big things are happening from Abyssinia to the Russian front.

What is wrong with The Victors? Well, rhetorical questions, for one thing. Marco asks too damn many of them, like:

Why was there only the connivance of habit between us, after a few drinks in the middle of the night came the time for nondeforming mirrors and confessions, why would I do nothing; why did our bodies, though, skin against skin, go to each other and why did we let them go, without illusions and almost without pleasure?

There are too many apostrophes, too much hot air, too many names without bodies, and just not enough of the detail that simulates human life.