war novels.

I bought Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried yesterday, and that got me thinking about wars and literature. I find it odd that the less-“popular” wars — Vietnam, for example, or WWI — have produced some really great literature, the kind of stuff that gets read by every high-school or college student. Out of Vietnam came The Things They Carried. Out of WWI came Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. But off the top of my head I can’t think of The Great WWII novel. Of course there is lots of popular fiction about WWII (I’m still working on City of Thieves at the moment), and some of it is very good. There is just as much superb non-fiction. John Hersey’s Hiroshima stands out. But what is the enduring piece of literary fiction that comes out of WWII? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything. Well — there is Slaughterhouse-Five. And Catch-22. If you trust the BBC by way of Wikipedia, Catch-22 is “one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.” But I don’t know if either of those can really be classified as a war novel. In both cases, it seems like WWII just happens to be the setting… the springboard for sending a message that could be sent just as effectively from a different springboard.

Is it because WWII is the “popular” war, and it was and continues to be covered so much by the media and Hollywood that anything more would be redundant? Maybe, because it has been covered so much, there is just not enough left open to an author’s interpretation or imagination. Unlike Vietnam or WWI; Vietnam, as it says on the back of The Things They Carried, is the “nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb.” WWI, at least in most of the history books I had in school, is usually just a brief, precursory footnote to more interesting things like WWII. There are still things about those wars that are ambiguous and shadowy; WWII has been done to death.

That’s as far as my reasoning takes me. I guess the question to pose is, what do you think is the best piece of WWII fiction? Why?