SOURCE: "Gentlemen in Battle," in National Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 23, December 11, 1995, pp. 128, 130-31.

Didion is a prominent American novelist, essayist, and screenplay writer. In the following, originally published in National Review in 1962, she reviews The End of the Battle, the final novel in Waugh's Men at War trilogy, noting what she considers Waugh's excellent depiction in the book of utter futility in the modern-post-World War II-world.

Distinctively dolorous by nature, I have to date been saved from my own instincts mostly by the relentless interference of my acquaintances, one or two of whom seem to have perfect pitch for my absurdities, if not always for their own. I recall in particular one bitter morning in New York, my 23rd birthday, when I woke with intimations of mortality to find outside my door, attractively done up in a Henri Bendel box, the jacket of a Henry James novel painstakingly...