The problem that many of us have is that there are no contemporary comparables. Litgal more or less assured me of that when she reported in the historical discussions that there were now many historical novels being published about World War II and suggested there weren't any of any later time.
Of course I haven't finished writing this yet, and there may be some before I am finished, but meanwhile... I know I've summarized Prelude before but perhaps a little different form here will suggest my dilemma. Prelude is set in a stateside Army garrison, Ft.Ord, California near the height of the Vietnam war. The plot is very much about the conflicts between war protesters, war resisters, the institutions of the American Army, and political radicalism.
Assuming I don't find contemporary works, the setting and much of the plot does much to recall, mirror, and transform the elements of James Jones' From Here to Eternity.
My main character lives in a kind of no man's land between the political opponents where there are real and imagined conspiracies that force him to discover "the truth" In that way he has more than a passing resemblance to the travels of John le Carre's George Smiley, perhaps most particularly in Smiley's People.
Neither of these truly great novels are historical. They were written as contemporary fiction and well within the immediate memory of their first audiences. And they are both giants of their own genre's of a stature I have only the most remote hope of attaining or representing. If I use these novels as comp's I must do so with the caveat that only my audience can determine if the comparisons are apt.
There are several novels now about the Vietnam war. I am particularly fond of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried which in a great many ways took very close to my own combat experience. That said however it is not a comp for the novel I am working on now which is not about combat but garrison duty and the preparations for war rather than war itself.
Please provide me with some of your, thoughts, reflections, or advice. Thank you,
Tom P
Thought you guys might like to know how I found a contemporary historical for a comp. I went to Amazon and put in fiction protest and Vietnam as the search terms instead of the name of a book or author. This kicked back a much awarded debut novel "The Fourteenth of September" by Rita Robinette. Since Le Carre is still writing spy novels I combined that with his latest "Agent Caught Running in the Field."
I could approach this from the otherside - novels about protest of the war, but again I do0n't know any. With a protest novel it would then make better sense to add back in any book about garrison life. I'm fond of James R Crumley's One to Count Cadence, but that's even more obscure than From Here to Eternity.
The war itself is not in my book. Reflections of the war - i.e. PTSD afterwards is in my first novel with the same main character, though certainly not in either case, me.
The book is good. The movie, not so much. Old Man's War is probably a better comp, as the first third of that or so is all the stuff leading up to him joining and the training he goes through. Same with the first book of Marko Kloos's Frontline series, though the name of that book escapes me at the moment. It's really a pretty common format...the training in the first third and then the war. Full Metal Jacket has a similar formula.
I grinned when I noted what you're are publishing and mentoring here. Maybe Starship Troopers is a comp? Not!
I'm trying to think of any and I can't off the top of my head. But I've been reading mostly SF and F lately.
Good idea. What you're saying is find recently published novels that cover the training phase of WWII or even conceivably of WWI and draw the comparison. That will work if I can find any. Guess I've got to get reading.
Thank you. Good idea. I did think From Here to Eternity was too far to reach.
Okay -- I'm going to take a shot at this, figuring maybe I'm the only one who gets all your references (because I'm old and served in combat). I can't specifically think of any Vietnam books that would comp the events you're talking about, because most of the Vietnam books I know -- while the cover things on the homefront to some extent -- focus on the combat. This would include We Were Soldiers Once and Young, Matterhorn, and, as you mentioned, The Things They Carried (which I taught to students this year). So bottom line, I'm not sure the book you're looking for exists...and if it does, because it may be unknown, it wouldn't be a great comp. So what about taking something that deals with similar topics from another war and comping it to that book, but comping it in a way that indicates a different time period. I think that can be a powerful comp, because you can show a successful book for one war but with an original update. There are definitely a lot of WWII historicals out. Kristin Hannah has a few,