William Styron, The Long March (1952). Recommended for adults.
Styron (1925-2006) is an acclaimed writer whose work I have largely missed. I read his Lie Down in Darkness (1951) as student and probably missed most of it though I can have been only a few years younger than he was when he published it at the age of 24. His two most famous novels are Sophie’s Choice (1979) and The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).
I recently read The Long March. In one word: Powerful. To say, accurately, that it is an account of an U. S. Army Reserve training exercise says everything and nothing. It is about an exercise that tests the men involved against each other in a contest of wills, while simultaneously testing them each individually in a battle within himself to keep going on the long march.
It is training and those who drop out get a ride back to base. There is no enemy trying to kill them. Yet it is arduous and soul-destroying to keep moving.
The prose is windowpane clear. The author does not intrude into the action with poetic flourishes or clever comparisons. The story is left to speak for itself. That is indeed bold.
It compares to the hypnotic passages describing physical effort in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), though the accolade must go to Mailer’s book.
The tools for hyper linking, underlining, and bolding remain off line. Oh, hum.
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