A Sleeper
Campbell, Will D.
A Sleeper THE GLAD RIVER by Will D. Campbell Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 310 pp. $14.50. Books, observed a New York publisher not long ago, have become the software of the entertainment industry....
...If marketing is now everything and content is irrelevant, any book that is difficult to classify or to summarize in a few words is a good bet for stillbirth...
...His way has been with words, written and spoken plainly...
...Will Campbell's The Glad River thus would appear at a glance to be a prime candidate for the remainder shelves...
...The Glad River is not without its flaws...
...Without great fanfare, The Glad River has been dropped unobtrusively into the book marketing hopper that spews out thousands of new titles each month...
...it is confusing in places, and a few of its developments seem contrived, and its symbolism is occasionally overdone...
...Authors and their words must be packaged like soap powder or perfume to sell...
...That passage alone is enough to make the book more than run-of-the-mill...
...But for every small liability there are many large assets...
...The Glad River follows three young soldiers from the backwoods of Louisiana to the jungles of Guadalcanal and back...
...Campbell has not written a novel before, but he is no amateur story teller...
...It is a morality play, a parable on equality, a sermon on kinship—and yet, like every good novel, it is also an absorbing tale that lingers in the mind...
...It is both the fact and the symbolism of this bond that carry the story with sure-handed strength to its conclusion...
...It is also about baptism, but it is not your standard religious/inspirational fare...
...Their chance meeting develops into an uncommonly close relationship, a brotherhood they come to call "the neighborhood" or "the community...
...Now he has added to his sermons and country songs and non-fiction books this novel as another means of getting his thoughts and insights across to whoever happens by...
...Among its principal characters are Red-bones, Cajuns, and Sixteenth Century Anabaptists...
...It contains plenty of violence but not much sex...
...The sophisticated folks who sell books— and buy them—are not going to know what to make of this strange and disturbing work by an unorthodox Southern Baptist like Will Campbell, so the chances are they won't make anything of it, and it will be a commercial failure...
...John Egerton (John Egerton, a free-lance writer in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote "Visions of Utopia...
...One of the most memorable is a sixty-page encounter between Doops Momber, a central character in the book, and a lone Japanese soldier in the Guadalcanal jungle...
...But once in a while, the word-of-mouth praise of readers quickly spreads, confounding the predictions of the marketing experts, and a good book gets around in spite of its scant notices...
...Along the way, the book is reminiscent in places of such dissimilar works as M*A*S*H and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and the Book of Revelations...
...It is no wonder that 80 per cent of all books now being published are financial failures...
...It is a first novel by a Baptist preacher...
...Campbell's Glad River is richly deserving of such a people's rescue...
...Four years ago he wrote Brother to a Dragonfly, a memoir of actual kinship between himself and his late brother, Joe Campbell...
...It is a powerful antiwar statement...
...If that is the case, then the relative handful of Campbell-watchers and book-lovers who happen to pick this one up and take it home and read it through will be the only ones who can say what a good novel it really is...
...The story is about three young men from the South in the 1940s, but it is not a Southern novel...
...The title suggests a happy book, or perhaps a funny one, yet it is neither...
...For the past twenty-five years or so, he has been engaged in the great moral and social issues of our time, not as a leader of the institutional church but as a voice in the fields and in the streets...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
