SOURCE: "The Fittest Survive, but Fit for What?" in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 19, 1993, pp. 2, 8.

[In the following review, Wiley discusses the main theme of Dickey's To the White Sea.]

James Dickey makes novels out of ideas. In Deliverance, 23 years ago, the idea was to take four men, each representing various degrees of self-reliance, and see what happens to them when, during a canoe trip down a wild river, the laws of civilization break down. As it turned out, the toughest of those men, a character named Lewis who must have had a bomb shelter full of weapons and canned goods in his back yard, was the prototype for Sgt. Muldrow, the narrative voice driving James Dickey's new novel, To the White Sea.

As this new work opens it is early March of 1945, and Muldrow, a tail gunner, is preparing for one of the last missions over...