The Army's Grotesquery

...Unavoidably, a number of fairly stock military figures slither into the story...

...It's awfully big out there...

...Clay keeps going with the aid of his grand imagination ; Slaughter with his introspective sensuality...

...First, because Goldman has drawn them so well, and, second, because they do, in fact, exist...

...It has also to do with Master Sergeant Maxwell Slaughter, a man whose unusual gifts are conjoined with a very high personal style, who is too philosophically endowed to attempt either effort wholeheartedly...

...It was really...

...Together Clay and Slaughter live out the watered-down grotesqueries of the modern Army: the juke-box, the pin-ball machine, the endless chain of beers, the foot-long hot dog, and the rest of it...

...Soldier in the Rain has few lines that ought ever cause its author regret...

...Out of barren sands, William Goldman has fashioned a small but precious pebble...

...He laughs with the awareness that a non-combat Army in America, however needful, is largely preposterous, at least for those caught up in the day-to-day military mess...

...We learned him how," Clay said...

...And most important of all, he does not laugh at the military experience guiltily...

...Part of the merit of Goldman's novel is in his accurately imbuing his story of military life with a background of flatness, fantasy and a sort of Robinson Crusoe atmosphere in which each person lives with the threat of being crushed by the great grim establishment...

...Free-lance writer I SUPPOSE IT is good to laugh at the experience of a peacetime Army...

...So, things being what they are, with every prospect pointing to their continuing as they are, one laughs...

...So anyway, to get back to the point, there we was, out on the highway, doing the four-minute mile, and I was in the car and old Meltzer, he was puffing along outside with me cheering him on, because we was gonna rent the Rose Bowl and your son, he had guts to spare, because he'd already threw up once and we was zipping along, like I said, when all of a sudden from behind us this car comes zooming up out of nowhere, bigger'n shit, and—" "It was really very funny, Mother," Meltzer interrupted...

...There is the sadistic MP Sergeant (it is not unusual for ill-natured men who are not kept busy to opt unnecessary cruelty as a way out of their boredom...

...Good because there really isn't much else one can do about it...

...And there is the Captain, the eternal omnipresent Captain, whose exact job, whose reason for being, is always a fascinating question...

...Soldier in the Rain has to do with Sergeant Eustis Clay and his frenetic efforts to beat the flatness and perpetuate the fantasy of military life...

...In Soldier in the Rain, his third novel, William Goldman laughs at the Army in what seems to me precisely the correct way...

...Both have a fine sense of prose rhythm and tend to sentimentality, a blemish but not a destroying quality because it is informed by sincerity...

...Meltzer, a draftee formerly of Yale, his mother and his fiancee, for Clay, Slaughter and a 14-year-old town girl named Miss Bobby Jo Pepperdine...

...It ought to be said too that Soldier in the Rain is not so much a novel as a protracted series of jokes so excellent, and the author so charming in telling them, that there occurs, as in the work of most effective humorists, an extremely willing suspension of pe-danticism...

...That leaves only the danger of laughing the experience away...

...Goldman's ear is excellent, and reminiscent of James Agee's...

...Meltzer said...

...One can of course bitch—certainly a more compulsive alternative than laughter— but that too soon becomes a bore and in the end simply won't do for survival...

...He started laughing again, louder...

...Jay doesn't drink," Mrs...

...Still, neither is wholly a liberated person, because, as Slaughter puts it, "the world's outside that window, Eustis, and it scares me...

...Fine...

...Yet the presence of these types ought not to be considered a serious flaw...

...it has others he may take joy in and there is also one memorable scene—quite enough for a novel of modest intention—which promises to stay in mind for a considerable time—a discharge party given by Pfc...