Vietnam, Book Review | featured news

Karl Marlantes’s first novel, “Matterhorn,” is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes ­— a highly decorated Vietnam vet — spent 30 years writing this book.

It took Denis Johnson nine years to write Tree Of Smoke, his multilayered, 2007 National Book award-winning Vietnam epic. Nobody Move, Johnson's neo-noir shoot-'em-up about a small-time gambler and barbershop-chorus singer named Jimmy Luntz - who runs into trouble in the form of Ernest Gambol, a tall, sad, savage man with a very large head - feels like it was written in nine weeks.