I’ll be buying this book (Amazon link), not because I really want to read a Vietnam War novel, but because I want to reward an author who takes editing as seriously as it should be taken:
This is one of the great works of fiction about that war, or any war, and it emerged from a patient, 30-year writing effort in the face of skepticism from everyone but the author himself. The book has a dramatic back story. Marlantes, from a tiny West Coast logging town, won a Rhodes Scholarship from Yale—and then left Oxford after a semester to fight as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, where he was badly wounded and highly decorated. He began writing his story in the mid-1970s and steadily refined what had been a 1,700-page first draft to the fast-moving 600 pages of the published version.
Maybe it’s just my NADD (Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder) but I’ll be goddamed if I can find many books that are well edited, especially in history and politics. Nixonland was just a sprawling mess. I’m reading Boardwalk Empire right now and my Kindle is in danger of being pitched across the room because the author did a nice, tight job with Nucky Johnson (the model for the show’s Nucky Thompson), then filled the rest of the book with deadly dull details about the present-day reformers. There’s no reason why every book has to be as long and dense as a Jane Austen David Foster Wallace novel, other than perhaps the publisher’s need to justify charging a rapacious $12.99 for a Kindle version that costs almost nothing to distribute and should be shorter by half.
Norwonk
OK, time to fess up: You’ve never read a Jane Austen novel, have you?
harokin
In what universe is a Jane Austen novel either long or dense? You could read any of them on a coast-to-coast flight.
Mike Goetz
Ever try to read Kevin Phillips? Impossible to do.
Lee
Link fail. You linked to the list, not the specific book.
You meant:
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes?
http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/easel/images/galleries/103927_Matterhorn_slide.jpg
JMS
What harokin said. There might be reasons people don’t like Jane’s work, but her novels are neither long nor dense. That is all.
p.a.
I wonder if it has anything to do with composing on computers vis ink-and paper? The red pencil is obsolete. Another loss resulting from digital, we lose seeing the author’s thought processes- assuming the edited texts survive of course, and therefore miss the evolution of the work itself.
geg6
Jane Austin? Long? Dense? Seriously? [shakes head] I’m guessing you didn’t like English or literature or history classes in school, either.
Personally, I found Nixonland to be just about as perfectly written as any history I’ve ever read. I never trust a history or biography (my two personal favorite reads) that is less than 600-700 pages and prefer them to be well over that. I don’t understand how you can cover anything about a historical period or a major historical figure in less than that. Well, perhaps you can, but you can’t do it well.
benjoya
how bout a non-amazon link? you know, one that won’t go down later today.
guster
A rapacious $13 for a product someone spent at least a year writing, in struggling industry hardly known for Wall Street style bonuses.
mistermix
@Lee: Yeah, thanks, added an Amazon link because it’s impossible to direct link to the review.
For the Austen fans, I made the post all better, see?
Shawn in ShowMe
Maybe mix is thinking of Charlotte Bronte.
BGinCHI
It’s a really, really terrific novel. I highly recommend to everyone here.
It helps if you’re interested in Vietnam, but at bottom it’s a serious meditation on war, human suffering, and the fucked-upness of American adventures abroad.
Some of the racial politics seem clunky at first, but hang in there. Marlantes is brave to write about those issues the way he does, and though there are flaws it’s thought-provoking stuff.
If nothing else, following the grunts through what they experience is amazing. You’ll wonder how they survived.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I think the best example may be Stephen King’s The Stand. I read it, but his need to overuse metaphors ruined it a bit for me.
stuckinred
It’s pretty good but there are better.
In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War
Tobias Wolff
Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam
Philip D. Beidler
RE Matterhorn,
If you don’t believe tigers killed Marines in I Corps let me know and I’ll get you a picture.
mistermix
@guster: I have no interest in subsidizing the publishing industry, who are the ones making the big bucks here, not the author.
Nemo_N
Ahem:
Ten Rules for “Serious” Writers
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Plus Caputo’s A Rumor of War and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
And of course Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Pick up Beidler, he teaches English at Bama and is a really good dude. Also
Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam [Paperback]
John Balaban (a civilian aid worked who was with an agency trying to get badly burned kids to the States for treatment. He went back after the war and collected and translated Vietnamese Oral Poetry),
guster
@mistermix: Nobody’s making the big bucks. The publishing industry is always in the shitter–largely because the publishing industry is idiotic, I’ll admit–but believe me, other than a few lottery winners, ‘big bucks’ doesn’t happen in publishing. It’s not a highly-paid field like sneaker sales or something, shopping cart manufacture.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: I have a nice signed copy of Things from when Tim was hangin at the Globe.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Will check it out. Thanks.
I grew up with many Vietnam war vets and know so many stories about the whole thing. Plus, watched PTSD up close (and suffered for it) before there was any such diagnosis.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: What was he doing in the Classic City??
Don’t tell me it was when I was there and I missed him….
You know Marilyn Brownstein?
stuckinred
Sgt Phelger USMC was killed by a tiger on 5 May 1970. He was dragged from his harbor site during the night. His team found blood trails that lead to his remains the next morning. The tiger was standing over its prey. Phelgers teammates opened fire, missed and the tiger vanished into the jungle.
A couple of weeks later this tiger was killed by Sgt Larkins
Gus
Agree about Nixonland. There were some really bizarre typos and really clunky sentences. There are probably in most history books, but there were some really jarring ones to me. “To the manner born”? WTF?
Xantar
I’m going to forward this post to George R.R. Martin. And the ghost of Robert Jordan.
mistermix
@guster: Yes, but how much of that $12.99 goes to the author? If it’s $10, then I should STFU and pay it happily. If, as I suspect, it’s 29 cents, then fuck the publisher.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: He did a reading at the Tate Center and then came to hang with some vets. I was still drinkin so it was at least 19 years ago. Not sure about Marylin.
mnpundit
You know what would be a great feature? If you could edit books on the kindle yourself and save the results. Keep an original copy in case you screw up, but then you can make it as fast moving at you like.
I think it would be cool to trade those, but that’s probably not in the cards for copyright reasons.
stuckinred
@Gus: God it took me 2 months to read that. On the upside he wrote about shit that happened to me personally so that was good.
mnpundit
@Xantar: Blame Harriet. She was his editor and she did a piss poor job of it. I’ve already told my wife (who is a trained copyeditor) that when I become published I’d like her to edit for grammar and structure but stay the hell away from content, we’ll go to the appropriate editors for that.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Damn. It had to be after I left in ’91. I wouldn’t have missed it.
She taught in the Eng Dept. Great lady. Just wondered.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Check it out, I got published!
Gus
@stuckinred: Yeah, I loved the book, it just could have been better written. I enjoyed it enough to finally read Nixon Agonistes, which I’d been meaning to read for years. I’d recommend reading the two one right after the other. Pearlstein obviously took a lot of inspiration from Wills’ book.
sfbevster
Glad to see others have ripped you a new one about the Austen snark, so I don’t have to.
Kristine
@mistermix: Except that when the publisher gets fucked, it’s the writer who gets turned out onto the street with his/her big ol’ scarlet sales figures tattooed on his/her forehead. They follow you like bankruptcy.
Readers try to separate Evil Publisher from Writer in their minds. Unfortunately, we are joined at the hip until the publisher (in most cases) decides it is no longer economically feasible to continue the relationship.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: The copyright on this copy is 90 but he didn’t date it, just the obligatory “Welcome Home, Peace”.
stuckinred
@Gus: I didn’t think anyone knew about the Minutemen sending threats to us in Champaign-Urbana!
Dennis SGMM
@BGinCHI:
Another recommendation for Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.
Both capture the surreal nature of being a combatant in Vietnam. After I’d been in the Delta for a couple of months I wrote my parents that the ground seemed to shrink away from my step.
Paul in KY
@BGinCHI: I don’t know if you’re talking about Vietnam books only or any war book.
If it’s any war book, I did enjoy ‘A Soldier in the Great War’. Some great passages about some battles in the Alto Adige.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Great stuff. I was 4 months old when you went in to the service, you old fart.
What’s an Honest John unit? That’s a new one for me.
stuckinred
@Dennis SGMM: In Pharaoh’s Army is set in My Tho with MACV , it’s not a novel but Wolff is an incredible writer. There is a part where he is on that road from Dong Tam to My Tho with a tv on his lap that will kill ya laughing.
srv
I’ve heard that Matterhorn is a great book from several sources, going to check it out myself this season.
BGinCHI
@Dennis SGMM: You read Matterhorn yet?
Church Lady
Editing problems probably are because editing jobs at the publishing houses are almost impossible to get. If you are lucky enough to land one, they don’t pay squat. It’s a really thankless profession.
Crashman
@mistermix: I know it’s totally popular to bash the EVIL CORPORATE PUBLISHERS, and yeah, a number of them are evil bastards who only care about profits, but there are some publishers out there who are more than that. I work in the industry, and contrary to your opinion, there ain’t a lot of money flowing around here. It’s enormously expensive to create a book; you have to pay the (modest!) salaries and benefits of editors, copyeditors, marketing and publicity people and their campaigns, designers, warehousing, distributing, etc. Printing costs are a TINY fraction of all this overhead, so it kind of annoys me when people seem to think that the bulk of the cost of the book is in the printing. It just isn’t.
Then, once the books hit the bookstore, an average of 30% (if you’re lucky) of them get shipped back to the publisher because they aren’t sold, and the publisher is obligated to completely reimburse the book store.
The industry is majorly screwed up, particularly with the returns problem, and the fact that they’re almost all owned by a handful of huge corporations, and yeah, authors should make more royalties than they do, but as a whole, publishing companies are not rich fat cats, lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills.
BGinCHI
@Paul in KY: Thanks for that.
Big ass book. Helperin is a good writer and I’ll check it out.
Culture of Truth
Bring me the Big Red Pen!
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: They were big rockets launched off a truck. They could have a nuke warhead but by 69 they were basically obsolete. It was a terrible assignment, especially since I had just come from Korea (marginally a combat zone during the Pueblo and Blue House Raid) and was pretty salty. I don’t mention it in that piece but three of us actually PAID to get into a unit going to the Nam. Tim’s piece about Canada or the Nam resonates greatly. There was no way I could do 18 months stateside so it was one or the other and I couldn’t desert. I have no problem with anyone who chose that path but I couldn’t do it.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: I like his style but the idea of humping a record player in the bush. . .maybe so but damn. There is a BJ regular that used a loudspeaker to blast Henrix down on a valley but it was mounted on a vehicle.
TBogg
Not a fan of Matterhorn. 900 pages of mud, rain, mud, rain, etc etc. Yeah. We get it. Also, occasional cartoonish dialog.
Another thumbs up for Cacciato, Dispatches, with an additional nod to Gloria Emerson’s Winners & Losers
WereBear
@Crashman: And they are on the verge of becoming obsolete; functionally, I mean.
For instance, I self-published a cat care book on Kindle.
It’s called Cat 911, if you want to get it through John’s Amazon link, above.
I got tired of trying to convince publishers to even look at it. It doesn’t fit into the Common Wisdom of a million other cat books, and I’m not known (yet, heheh) and they wanted ME to come up with the marketing plan for it. What am I paying them for?
I copyedited it myself, because it’s what I can afford, and I have done it before. I don’t do it in any other case because it is now considered a disposable job. Though badly, badly needed.
But now they seem to want celebrities from the getgo. I remember when they were the ones who wanted to make the authors into celebrities.
So while I mourn the loss of The Publishing Industry, it started dying in the sixties; it’s only a shadow of its former self.
stuckinred
One Very Hot Day, Halberstam
more Mekong Delta
from an Amazon review:
David Halberstam was one of the first outstanding journalists stationed in Saigon, who came down and covered operations in the Delta in the first years of the war. His writing is intense, and always unfailingly accurate. This story here was one of the early books written about the war, and was a “bible” for those of us who were there in the mid-sixties
Bnut
Not Vietnam, but One Soldier’s War still stays with. Makes me glad I served in the US military, even with all its fuckedupedness.
Paris
I like big sprawling books but Thomas Pynchon makes me feel inept. I keep trying but Gravity’s Rainbow is either a bad dream or not written in English. Someday I’ll finish it – I take perverse joy in the perseverence. He’s a good author right? I’m supposed to be impressed, right?
stuckinred
@Bnut: I read Ivan’s Army about WWII Russian Grunts, sheeshh! USA USA
jeffreyw
A Bright and Shining Lie
WereBear
@Paris: You can’t try to make sense of him at the time.
You just let it wash over you… and a couple of years later it starts pinging back at you like an acid trip flashback and you get it.
Dennis SGMM
@stuckinred:
I’ll give it a read. Despite the situation there, or maybe because of it, some genuinely funny things happened once in a while. That often gets overlooked.
@TBogg:
Dispatches is superb. It was out of print for a while but, I just looked on Amazon and it’s back. Highly recommended.
Crashman
@WereBear: Did you have an agent? They’re the new front door to the industry these days; its practically impossible to get a deal through an unsolicited manuscript.
Michael57
@Crashman: You think 30% is too high? I’m a bookstore owner, and I think that’s a little high but on the whole pretty reasonable. The reason that books are returnable is to induce bookstores to take chances on new writers, new ideas. If books were not returnable they would either be much more expensive OR bookstores would stick to the safe and the dull.
Meanwhile, all these folks just loving Amazon and protesting that $12.99 is too high! It makes me sick, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re seeing our entire literary culture being progressively devalued and belittled. Imagine that: these people think nothing of spending $12.99 for flavored lattes from Dunkin Donuts, just to shut the kids up in the back seat–lattes that took 60 seconds to make and will be consumed in less–but they cry bloody murder if they have to shell out $12.99 for a book it took a guy years to write and it might take readers years to digest.
At the end of the day this will become a kind of digital Maoism. All the artists and intellectuals will be working for nothing.
stuckinred
@jeffreyw: His follow up was good too
After the War Was Over
WereBear
@Crashman: I used to, but he retired.
I’m still in the market… I figured since publishers want you to do a blog and promote the book and such, I’d go ahead and do that, and I did. Passed half a million total hits a couple months ago.
The Way of Cats
marcel
@benjoya: I want to add my support to a non-Amazon link. After what they did to Wikileaks, we should be following Daniel Ellsberg’s call for a boycott of amazon. Here’s a B&N link to Matterhorn.
Incidentally, when I click on the link next to the Amazon link, I get to the Atlantic web site, a page about the Patti Smith memoir.
Crashman
@Michael57: I’ve heard 30% is modest, and for some mass markets, it’s closer to 50%. Anyway, I sympathize. I don’t mean to criticize the book stores, but most people don’t realize that the publisher’s have to account for this loss of revenue in their list prices. The whole structure of the industry is in trouble, from the bookstores on up to the publishers, and no one knows how to fix it.
Michael57
@Dennis SGMM: Dispatches has never been out of print…? Why did you think it was? Great, great book.
stuckinred
@Michael57: He wrote the script for Full Metal Jacket as well. “Something about the duality of man sir”!
Culture of Truth
That’s not fair – some fast food also takes years to digest.
Dennis SGMM
@Michael57:
Hmmm. I recall trying to buy it a decade or so ago and I had to buy it used. That may have been a temporary situation. It was my fault anyway because I kept giving away my copy of the book.
Paris
@WereBear: Thanks. That’s a good description and I feel less inept.
ts
For money, the greatest war story is Salinger’s “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise.” [pdf] Probably the most painfully beautiful thing the man ever wrote.
burnspbesq
@geg6:
Yes.
Nixonland sprawled because the subject matter required that it sprawl.
WereBear
@burnspbesq: I adored Nixonland. It probably could have been twice as long, too.
Kristine
@WereBear:
They’re supposed to be paying you. Money flows *to* the writer.
burnspbesq
@Paris:
Try Ulysses as a warmup for Gravity’s Rainbow. ;-)
stuckinred
@ts:
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
stuckinred
And No Birds Sang:
Farley Mowat
About the Hasty Peas, a Canadian Regiment in WWII Europe.
ts
@stuckinred: Wow. Damn, Jarrell was good.
WereBear
@Kristine: That was in a global sense; I was complaining because they asked me to perform all these feats that require an entire publishing house… myself, in a query.
Before they even ask to read the book.
Bnut
@stuckinred: I always thought this was about abortion.
Jeffro
@BGinCHI: Ditto on the recommendation, but it is a bit drawn-out in places.
‘Course, I’ve noticed that as my internets reading has gone up, my patience with ‘regular’ reading goes down. Scary to think I could work my way through novel after novel as a teen…now, not so much.
Triassic Sands
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
One of the world’s most accomplished overwriters. @Paris:
I’d recommend that you not bother going back to “Gravity’s Rainbow.” You can’t read everything and there are probably thousands of books out there that will be more rewarding for you.
I was stuck in the boonies in late 1974 (or January 1975) and the only source of books was a convenience/liquor store. One day, starved for something good to read, I spun the racks and saw this huge new paperback. “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Nation Book Award winner! I was really excited!!! Over the years I started the book many times, but never got much past 125 pages. I can say that I’ve read more than a thousand pages of an 800 page book.
Many years later a girlfriend — with Asperger’s and an insatiable need to read — decided to read “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Not long after beginning, she bought a GR companion (>400 pages) to help her understand all the esoterica. Eventually, she finished “Gravity’s Rainbow,” but rather than crow about her great accomplishment, she didn’t want to talk about it at all. It was clearly one of the low points of her reading life — and reading is her life.
I love books. And I think there are books worth struggling with. But “Gravity’s Rainbow” isn’t one of them. It’s fine for reading to be difficult, but it shouldn’t be painful. It’s been so long since I picked up “Gravity’s Rainbow,” I don’t even remember why I didn’t like it, but I’ve tried to read other Pynchon books and never enjoyed one. I guess I just don’t like his writing.
Many years ago I read “Atlas Shrugged.” Today, I would never finish it. First, it’s garbage. And second, when John Galt begins his endless blather, there is simply no reason to go on. I’m not comparing “Gravity’s Rainbow” to “Atlas Shrugged” as literature. GB may well be great literature, while AS is just ideological nonsense, but what is the same about the two books, however, is that one shouldn’t force oneself to finish a book that is unrewarding. Life’s too short and there are too many other books out there.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t waste five seconds arguing about GB with anyone. If it wasn’t worth reading (to me), then it certainly isn’t worth fighting about.
(I’ve always loved long books — if they are good — because a three or four hundred page book goes so fast there is a sense of loss when something gripping/involving is over so soon.)
birthmarker
I’m glad you said that about Nixonland. It’s a really complete history of midcentury American politics, but did I really need to know what some county commissioner in Seattle said about the Watts riots?
Brachiator
Length and “density” are not the only clues to good editing. Do you even know who the editors are for the books you either recommend or bash?
An editor could be involved in the earliest stages of a book. And in the case of somebody like Thomas Wolfe, there is evidence that the editor is as much the author of the work as the writer himself (Who Wrote Thomas Wolfe’s Last Novels?)
However, thanks for the warning about Boardwalk Empire. I was going to order it, but it sounds as though there is a lot of useless padding.
I recommend another book about the era and subject, Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
debbie
I’ve read close to 70 books this year, and only one — Philip Roth’s Nemesis — was typo-free. Even a graphic novel I read had a typo (the second n in innermost was backward, and this was a thought balloon by Anne Frank). I thought they were hand-lettered.
Erik Vanderhoff
Matterhorn is fucking stupendous. One of the best novels ever written about young men in war. You will not regret buying or reading it. I bought it for my eReader and bought a hard copy afterword, it was that good.
snarkout
Gravity’s Rainbow is great, but it really takes a while to get into the rhythms of it; reading the first 100 pages over and over is not uncommon among my acquaintances. The Crying of Lot 49 is a much faster read and lets you decide if Pynchon’s very real merits are worth the payoff of reading a deliberately difficult book.
(In Pharaoh’s Army is also really good; Wolff is a fantastic writer, although the one actual novel of his I’ve read, Old School, is pretty bad. His short fiction is mindblowing, though. Just sticks with you, not necessarily in a good way.)
Just curious: has anyone in this thread with an opinion on Vietnam books has read Yusuf Komunyakaa’sDien Cai Dau? What did you think?
Triassic Sands
@debbie:
I take your statement to mean there was only one book in which you didn’t find a typo. That is different from there not being one.
A typo-free book is more than a rarity, and anyone who has ever proofread someone else’s writing knows how difficult it is to catch every error.
debbie
@Triassic Sands:
While yes, anyone can always miss something, I am an editor. Considering how many stupid mistakes I’ve seen in books over the past year, there’s a part of my reptile brain that’s constantly on the look-out for such things.
Sadly, most errors I found were of the lazy spell-checker type (such as though instead of thought, or when a he suddenly becomes a she), Roth’s book was clearly very carefully copy-edited. Either his publisher values him (which they should) or he hires someone on his own dime.
John Harrold
It’s alternative history, but I think Harry Turtledove does a good job in terms of representing historical figures, nuanced perspectives of different people from different periods, and I think the writing is good as well.
Grover Gardner
Shameless self-promotion which I hardly ever do: There’s an amazing audio version of Matterhorn read by Bronson Pinchot (yes, that Bronson Pinchot) which I produced.
Harley
Dumb and proud. It’s the new black.
phein
Triassic Sands @81:
In 1976, I was a paratrooper stationed in Alaska, got sent out to Kotzebue, and spent the whole time at one Long-range radar site or another (DEW Line). I wasn’t expecting to be out of range of the PX for that long, so I had only grabbed two books: Atlas Shrugged, and Don Juan: Yaqui Ways of Knowing by Carlos Castaneda.
Strangely, both are self-help books based on a ‘separate reality.’
Matterhorn, btw, I enjoyed immensely. It’s a great take on how infantry companies are used, and infantrymen abused.
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