Just finished this novel this morning, having read it over the past few weeks while sitting in hospital rooms and waiting for Lisa to heal. It’s a war novel, yes, one that describes the conflict in Vietnam in now recognizable ways — apathy, poor leadership, anguish over loss — but has a few wrinkles I liked:

One, he deals head on with issues of race. The conflict between a foxhole friend and the reality of race in American life serves as a constant throughout the novel; this conflict produces a terrible moment near the end of the book, but in a way I didn’t anticipate. How do you empower a people? How do you fight back against racism in every day interactions and against the racism embedded in the structures that produce that racism? I don’t know if Marlantes is white or black and I wondered if black veterans would recognize the stories he was telling.

Two, it’s a story of functioning within an institution. Maybe it’s the end of the school year, maybe it’s that we’re trying to build a new school, but all of these players were instantly recognizable:

the young, ambitious person serving in a position they see as temporary
the lifer trying to survive and possibly prosper in an institution that is chewing up everyone around them
the accidental mid-level leader whose decisions have life or death impact, whose only real problem is their inability to see past the end of their nose
the glory focused leader who has lost total contact with the day-to-day life of the individuals they’re charged with leading

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: a Novel of the Vietnam War (New York; [Berkeley, Calif.]: Grove Press?; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2011).