Going After Cacciato borrows, for reasons not entirely clear to me, from the conventions of anti-war fiction as they are laid down in such books as A Farewell to Arms and Catch-22…. [Parts] of the narrative trade Hemingway's melodramatic understatement for the cartoonishness of Catch-22 which makes war nearly as exotic and interesting as it is horrifying and insane….

These bits of tone are the conventional signposts of O'Brien's novel. Fortunately its heart is to be found elsewhere—principally with Spec Four Paul Berlin at his observation post as he dreams a better ending to the war….

In the dream which occupies Berlin's hours on watch he and the rest of his comrades pursue the deserter Cacciato all the way to Paris treading a preposterously fine line between desertion and duty themselves. Their adventures and idylls along the road as Berlin imagines them are often formulaic, designed by...