There are a number of excellent reasons why James Jones's last novel shouldn't work, none of them particularly new. Jones was neither a psychologist nor a stylist; his characterizations lack both depth and complexity and his prose is serviceable at best, although there is, as always, rather a lot of it. His notions about sex are frequently preposterious, and his ideas concerning American womanhood are egregious when they are not positively insulting. His protagonists are unpleasant. His plot is a symphony based on a single note. His earnestness resembles that of a man trying to thread a needle in boxing gloves.

These qualities have inevitably proven fatal to most if not all of Jones's civilian fiction, but in Whistle—as in its predecessors in the trilogy, From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line—they are either moot or, what is more remarkable, they are improbably transmuted...