Word: delcorso
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sudden chorus of digital wristwatch alarms. From the audience, Helen McDonald (The Life and Times of Tondaleah Rosponowitz) asked, "Why are all these authors here? Is Key West the Paris of the '20s, the Tangier of the '60s?" Residents Thomas Sanchez (Rabbit Boss) and Philip Caputo (DelCorso's Gallery), who had been soberly addressing the topic "War and Peace hi the American Novel," considered the reasons. The true answers He in the words written in Key West, in the poems of Wallace Stevens, or Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, or Thomas McGuane...
...DELCORSO'S GALLERY by Philip Caputo; Holt, Rinehart...
Substantial parts of DelCorso's Gallery are set in Viet Nam and Lebanon; the novel is not only about war but also about the relationship between morals and aesthetics. Nicholas DelCorso, the proletarian hero with a limp caused by an old wound, acts as if the good and the beautiful are inseparable. He is an award-winning news photographer who, like a Hemingway bullfighter, prefers to work in close. The moment of truth occurs in the darkroom when the faces of he anguished and the dead resolve Beneath the surface of the developing solution...
Unlike P.X. Dunlop, his rival and former mentor, DelCorso does not doctor his work for effects. He believes that to dodge in shadows or turn bright noon into a moody twilight is to romanticize war's brutality. Dunlop, on the other hand, brands his ex-protégé's snapshots sensationalist. Author Caputo clearly sides with DelCorso and with an ethic that combines the redeeming social value of photography with the woozier aspects of Zen: "His intimacy with his camera had to be such that his use of it at the decisive instant was reflex action...
...novel's central rivalry climaxes in Beirut, though not before DelCorso tussles with guilt, a bruised class conscience and the bitter truth that he would rather chase wars than stay home with his wife and children. From the reader's point of view, this is a good thing. A domesticated DelCorso, brooding about integrity, mortgage payments and marriage, proves to be unbearable. Abroad, he is the subject of an oldfashioned, manly novel, crisply written with plenty of locker-room banter and bang-bang. -By R.Z. Sheppard
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