Author of the week: Karl Marlantes

last updated 8 January 2015

Karl Marlantes deserves a medal for perseverance, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. The 65-year-old Vietnam veteran was a young man when he started writing the novel that he hoped would convey to civilians the true experience of a Marine combat tour. This spring, that book is finally available nationwide, and it’s being hailed as one of the most devastating war novels in decades. Marlantes, a retired energy consultant, rewrote the story many times throughout the three decades in which publishers were turning up their noses at his manuscript. At times, he says, “I couldn’t get anyone to even read it to reject it.” Matterhorn finally gained a major publisher’s notice when a nonprofit publisher printed 1,200 copies, three years ago.

Marlantes seems like a man “whose life was radically altered by war,” said Sebastian Junger in The New York Times, “and who now wants to pass along the favor.” As its company of Marine infantrymen slog through one mission after another, the novel unfolds like an actual deployment—with violence and death, yes, but also “unbearable levels of repetition, boredom, and meaninglessness.” Writing such a book, Marlantes says, required a tremendous amount of patience. “Over the years, the book got better,” he says. “I learned from reading the greats—Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor and others—and asking, ‘How did they do that?’ You’ve got to stay at the table. If you walk away, nothing will ever happen.”