THE GUNNER

by William Stevens ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 1967

Young serial gunner Deacon decided to quit the Fifteenth Air Force after flying too many missions during the worst bombing runs of 1944. The monotony of his book-length self-concern totals up or down to the kind of anti-hero that general readers can't respond to with either sympathy or hate. Deacon's ordinariness has no texture--his stretches of pettiness, boring vulgarity, and drunkenness after he went A.W.O.L. in Italy aren't tufted with any moments of unmixed decency, while the characters he encountered who strove for that quality, such as an army psychologist and an attractive Red Cross girl, are either laughable or stupid or both. Deacon, the trained killer, afraid to be killed, survived a while as an armed guard for an Italian highjacking outfit. It's an over-ironic situation that dissipates to melodrama when Deacon gets run over by a jeep after patting a bomber on his belated return to the war. Mr. Stevens can write well, as he proved in his first novel, The Peddler (1966) but again he has accomplished too close a picture of a meanly motivated Everyman to find a reasonable readership. Deacon's story stretches back to such novelistic relatives as those of the early Remarque and the later Schweig; his first cousins today have a courtesy connection with Heller's Catch and Leo Rosten's Captain Newman, M.D. but this is the family lightweight in a long, strong literary line.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1967

Categories: FICTION