The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps

Elizabeth D. Samet

Except for the novella "The Long March" and the play "In the Clap Shack," Styron's work usually treats military culture obliquely. The Suicide Run tackles that culture head-on while, for the most part, avoiding the trap of reductiveness into which too much late-20th-century American war literature tends to fall. Styron chronicles what happens to those damaged by battles they did not fight—those who must dwell always in anticipation of the horrors to come.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

This posthumous collection from Pulitzer and National Book Award–winner Styron (Sophie's Choice) is a mishmash of early stories and unfinished novel excerpts that, while interesting as an artifact, adds little to his esteemed oeuvre. A former marine, Styron shows the horrors of war not through battle but through vignettes of men on leave (such as the title story) or in their quarters, struggling with their fate. “Blankenship” follows a young warrant officer as he investigates the escape of two Marines from a military prison island. Through interrogating another prisoner, McFee, Blankenship learns how deep soldierly ennui can run. “Marriot, the Marine” is about a writer recalled to duty as a reservist on the eve of his first novel's publication. He finds solace in a superior's love of literature and begins to believe that not all Marines are as brash as his roommate (he of the “wet, protuberant lower lip and an exceptionally meager forehead”), but the illusion doesn't last long. Styron's prose is as assured as ever and his knack for character is masterful, but the overall moralizing tone—war is debasement—is both too simple and too political to work in these character-driven stories. (Oct.)

Library Journal

The author of Sophie's Choice served with the U.S. Marines in the South Pacific at the end of World War II, and he developed a lifelong fascination with the Marine Corps. This book, which collects his writing about marines, includes three previously published stories, a vignette, and the opening pages of an unfinished novel. As one might expect, the material here is uneven. Two of these pieces are more like sketches than fully developed stories. The other three, however, are superb. "Blankenship" and "Marriott, the Marine" are complex character studies of career marine officers, while "My Father's House," from the unpublished novel, is a gem. Here Styron deals lovingly and courageously with a veteran returning home after World War II, struggling to transition to life back home in Virginia. Styron has always been drawn to moral and emotional complexity, and in these three stories we see him at work skillfully exploring that rich and provocative terrain again. VERDICT Recommended for readers of serious literary fiction.—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Kirkus Reviews

Short fiction from a Southern master of the sweeping, ambitiously themed, epic novel. Styron (Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays, 2008, etc.) didn't bother much with short stories, and most of the work here doesn't really fit that rubric. In fact, the publisher's note explains that three of these five pieces are fragments from novels that he set aside before his death in 2006. Even "Blankenship," which adheres the most closely to short-story convention, contains descriptive passages that suggest a longer project. Yet while Styron's most celebrated novels (Sophie's Choice, 1979; The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967) feature protagonists who by gender or race are obviously not him, the first-person narrator of much of the work here could pass as an authorial stand-in: a literary-minded young Marine, in the thrall of Faulkner and Fitzgerald, who attempts to balance military values with his own. The pieces are arranged chronologically by the dates they were written, rather than when they are set, so we can observe the author's development from the overblown cliches of "Blankenship" (1953), with dialogue straight out of a military prison flick, to the character development and depth of "Marriott, the Marine" (1971) and the exploration of the moral ambiguities of sex and race in "My Father's House" (1985). The closing snippet, "Elobey, Annob-n, and Corisco" (1995) provides the thematic coda: "I found myself in a conflict I had never anticipated: afraid of going into battle, yet even more afraid of betraying my fear, which would be an ugly prelude to the most harrowing fear of all-that when forced to the test in combat I would demonstrate my absolute terror, fall apart, and fail my fellowmarines." Taken as a whole, these fragments illuminate their author's obsessions and make the reader wish Styron had completed at least two more novels. Essential reading for the writer's fans; a revelatory footnote for others.