On its publication in 1982, James Carroll called Donald
Pfarrer’s Neverlight “the most intelligent and moving
novel that I have read about Vietnam.” Paul Fussell wrote
that it was “one of the finest novels about war I’ve ever
read, and that includes A Farewell to Arms.” Now
Pfarrer revisits the conflict and creates a modern
classic–an epic novel of all the wars we wage to occupy
ground, forge a future, and save our own souls. The
mission is Vietnam in microcosm: a quest to find and
obliterate a secret enemy weapons cache. Leading this
fateful journey is Captain MacHugh Clare, a draftee who has
become the consummate soldier. Unconcerned with death, he
shifts immediately each morning from unconsciousness to
action, “from sound sleep to a crashing heart.” His reward
at the end of the mission is the possibility of seeing his
beloved wife. But for now, he cannot stop fighting long
enough to see any other world but war. Beside Mac is his
opposite, Chaplain Paul Adrano, who knows only doubt and
disillusion. He has come to Vietnam to kill his fear, to
find his faith on the field of battle, and he will soon know
the forbidden power of violence and the pull of sexual
temptation. Meanwhile, in America, Mac’s wife, Sarah,
fights her own battle–against a feeling of uselessness, a
suspicion that she is “not fit for anything the world
needs.” Struggling with notions of a woman’s proper role,
Sarah begins to see possibilities beyond merely waiting at
home for the man she loves. They all complete their
missions in ways they had never anticipated. From a
jungle battlefield to the Citadel of Hue to the homefront,
Donald Pfarrer paints in prose both violent and lyrical his
characters’ attempts to believe and deny, commit and be
released, search and destroy. Not since Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead has a writer so powerfully
explored the inner lives of men and women in war. The
Fearless Man is a major work of fiction–one as
meaningful, wild, tortured, and unsettling as the Vietnam
experience itself.
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