Word: postcombat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novel chronicles the postcombat experiences of four World War II infantrymen: Mart Winch, John Strange, Bobby Prell and Marion Landers. All noncoms from the same outfit, three of them wounded, the fourth ill with the same kind of congestive heart condition that killed Jones, they ship home from the Pacific to a military hospital close by Luxor, a fictional Southern city on the Mississippi. There "the days passed with a swift inexorability that was the essence of a tragedy in a drama." And there the four muddle through a sequence of implausibly pathetic fates. The rushed, bumpy narrative seems less...
Mostly the heroes suffer familiar postcombat nightmares, get drunk and chase women whose habits and vernacular are not from the Deep South of the 1940s but from porn magazines of today. Luxor itself remains as dimensionless as its women, evoking the Memphis that was its model only in the names-Peabody and Claridge-stuck on its hotels...