Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Philip Roth is widely regarded as America’s best living writer, or at least one that’s actually publishing (coughSalingercough… tear). And after reading American Pastoral, I can certainly see why. But it was Tim O’Brien whom Joseph Heller, before he died, hailed as the best. (Perhaps there was some war genre bias going on, but nonetheless…) I read The Things They Carried (the book, not just the short story) earlier this year and thought it was great. A good piece of writing advice is to write about something you know and from that book you could tell O’Brien knows war. He lived it and breathed it in Vietnam so there is all this emotion and intimacy couched in his writing and reading him is actually pretty moving. The problem with Going After Cacciato though, despite its front, is that it’s not really a war novel. At least not in my opinion. I mean it starts off being in war but soon a small group of guys and their lieutenant take leave from the war to bring back one of their comrades, Cacciato, who has illegally fled the war to go to Paris. From there, the book is more about their journey to Paris and the interesting characters they meet along the way. The general outline actually reminded me a lot of The Sun Also Rises. The level of O’Brien writing that I found in The Things was still there but with a lacking plot, it was the only thing carrying this book.
The first chapter is actually really really sweet and with conviction I think it was originally a complete short story. In my opinion, it could easily be read as one—a very good one, I’ll say again. However, I think, and I may very well be wrong, that O’Brien tried to take this great story and continue to add 300-odd pages to it, which has to be a hard thing to do once you’ve completed a story that was only meant to be 15. Ergo, in the end, I found that I didn’t really care what happened to Cacciato and what they would do after they found him. Good prose, not so good plot. PWOAT.