SOURCE: Cunningham, Valentine. “The Weight of War.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 3810 (14 March 1975): 269.

In the following excerpt, Cunningham accuses Wolff of treating the horrors of war lightly in Ugly Rumours.

Ugly Rumours is less long, more comfortable to read, and a more shaped fiction: significantly, a lot of it takes place away from combat zones. Two buddies, the eternal fixer Woermer and the bear-like Grubbs, are followed through officer-training to a cushy number Woermer and his chums have fixed up in a safe-ish Vietnam village. There their careers and attitudes develop and diverge, until, back in the United States, they will never meet again. Savage ironies are duly observed, and in particular cinema-bred heroics are bloodily shot down. And the frightening things of Vietnam—the army of limbless veterans abandoned to their fates by the South Vietnamese government, for example—are broached seriously enough. But on the whole the...