Road trips mean you have lots of time to read

I've never written a book review before in any kind of non-academic setting. Here goes.

I just read a book called DelCorso’s Gallery by Philip Caputo. It is an easy and often captivating read packed with fully developed characters. The plot’s pacing is deliberately off-balance. It is sort of typical of its genre at time, but when it came to an end, I was disappointed. This is the kind of book that ought to last an entire road trip, not conclude on Day One. Oh well.

DelCorso’s Gallery is a book about a war photographer and his tremendously colourful menagerie of colleagues who roam the most dangerous landscapes the 1970s had to offer. And also, sort of, his far-away and elegant wife Margaret. The title photographer’s name is Nick, a street-grown wannabe boxer from Manhattan’s Little Italy.

Running around the world in search of stories worth telling, DelCorso handles a camera better than anyone he knows—he thinks so, anyway—and he yearns for the explosive excitement of the front lines. DelCorso insists, more to himself than to anybody else, that it’s not about living on the edge or finding a new edge or anything that a writer could transform into a cliché. It’s just about being there, observing humans at their worst, and telling people back home, wherever that is, about the assorted evil of war.

He experiences close calls with death, both as a freelancer and earlier as an army photographer: Vietnam, Cyprus, and Beirut—the usual suspects of the time.

The story opens in Ireland. DelCorso is supposed to be shooting a man while he fishes. Who he works for and why they are there is irrelevant. What matters is that the gig is a commercial arrangement, and DelCorso hates it. He promised Margaret that he would accept such jobs over those where he might be cut to pieces by bullets.

Predictably, the fisher pissed off DelCorso, who walked away and, despite his wife’s objection, immediately jumped at an assignment in Vietnam—Saigon on the brink of Communist conquest. This is where the plot really opens up and the best characters emerge. DelCorso pals around with other photographers, stringers for various agencies who are mostly known by their last names; his teacher-turned-rival Dunlop; and one grizzled asshole of a bureau chief named Bolton.

DelCorso’s Gallery swings back and forth between the characters as they challenge each others’ cynicism, or optimism, about their chosen trade.

At times, the plot resembles those of myriad films or books about conflict in Vietnam (or, later on in the book, Beirut) in the 1970s. The dialogue is weak and unimaginative in patches, and the relationships between characters tend to remain predictable throughout.

On balance, though, DelCorso’s Gallery is one of those books that appeals simply to readers’ sense of adventure. Not just anyone can be as talented as the characters with a camera or pen, but the sense that DelCorso and his pals are just normal guys in an abnormal environment makes them at least a little relatable.

Or maybe I just love a good story about a photographer, no matter how far-fetched.

POST-SCRIPT: Reading reviews at amazon.com and Wikipedia, I notice that the author was himself a war reporter, and a Pulitzer-winning journalist for coverage of Chicago election fraud in 1972. That makes all kinds of sense. I might read his autobiography, A Rumour of War. It was best-selling, so that must mean it’s worth it.