Haunting Reality

Americans also carry small wounds, which they poultice incessantly but never seem to repair. These are the incisions of domestic insecurity and violence: the divorces, multiple marriages, single parents et al. Tobias Wolff wrote arguably the finest book that has ever attempted to come to terms with the small wounds. His memoir, This Boy's Life, captured the trauma of a young boy growing up with a violent stepfather in such vivid, unsentimental and light prose that it achieved instant cult status. Now Wolff is back attempting to deal with the larger wound.

Not unsurprisingly for someone of his generation, Wolff survived his childhood to find himself in Vietnam. It proved to be the defining experience. Marooned in a sea of inscrutable hostility, in a treacherous terrain literally mined at random, death was the only reality. As Wolff writes, "It was the reality you lived in, that would live on in you through the years ahead, and become the story by which you remembered all that you had seen, and done, and been."

Wolff has remembered well, and told it better. With his light touch and unsparing honesty, he spurs his grim story into a trotting narrative which even has many funny moments. In Pharaoh's Army is a capital addition to the world's war library, and Wolff has done his bit to staunch a large wound.