Books: 'Going After Cacciato'
As a fictional portrait of this war, "Going After Cacciato" is hard to fault, and will be hard to better…. (p. 130)
[An] entirely different kind of game is being played here from the deadly-true account of Vietnam military action, and the picaresque interludes, which take up about half the novel, serve not only as relief from Vietnam but as a kind of excuse from it. At another juncture, with a fine colorful flair that does not omit comedy and shrewd political irony, O'Brien involves his squad of heroes with the Savak—the Iranian security police—and a flamboyant escape and shoot-out and car chase climax the episode as rousingly as in a James Bond movie. Violence is everywhere, O'Brien may be saying; but the effect, when the narrative returns to Vietnam, is that a little Ian Fleming unreality has rubbed off on the real action, and the reader slogs through the paddies waiting for the next bravura display of adventure writing. Violence that did occur, historically and unentertainingly, has been demeaned, lightened. For all its horrors, Mr. O'Brien's Vietnam has a precious, bejewelled aspect; as the novel shuttles among its three loci—the actual war, the imagined flight, the long night of Paul Berlin at the observation post—there builds up a slightly insulating lacquer of self-conscious art.
Still, mind has to be present in a book as well as matter, and the ambitious structure of the novel bespeaks an earnest intelligence that wishes to confront a traumatic experience on an ideological and moral level…. Mr. O'Brien owes a debt [to Hemingway] he does not try to conceal. "A Farewell to Arms" also embodies an idyll of love and escape but on the plane of actuality, and the geopolitical aspects of the war are disposed of in a few bitter sentences…. Compared to Mr. O'Brien, Hemingway had a settled conscience, and a single focus. The war, like the death of his heroine in child-birth, was "just a dirty trick." For the author of "Going After Cacciato," the debate over Vietnam and its concomitant issues … is an old hornet's nest that still buzzes, and he cannot avoid giving it a poke or two, from the standpoint of one who risked his life on behalf of dubious policies. Yet his essential contrast is not between Vietnam and other wars but between war and peace. "War has its own reality. War kills and maims and rips up the land and makes orphans and widows. These are the things of war. Any war." Whereas peace, Paul Berlin finds in Paris, is elusive in its reality. "He looked for meanings. Peace was shy. That was one lesson: Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there." By bringing to the stark facts of war the subtle style of peace, with its layers of ambiguity, O'Brien has written a modern novel old-fashioned in its wish to be morally exhaustive, to purge: not a war but a postwar novel. (pp. 130, 133)
John Updike, "Books: 'Going After Cacciato'," in The New Yorker (© 1978 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LIV, No. 6, March 27, 1978, pp. 128-30, 133.
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