I've never had much luck with Jones's classic FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (158 pages seems to be the furthest into it I've ever gotten), and I recall making a half-hearted attempted at the opening pages of this novel ages ago. Lately I found myself with an impulse to try it again; it starts out slowly, but the pace - and readability - pick up. I'm now a third of the way in, and feel that I'm along for the ride.Although I personally have absolutely no interest in scuba-diving, Jones's narrative - in which the sport figures quite prominently - manages to keep me interested. He wrote such manly, masculine, virile prose, and yet there always seems to be an underlying homo-eroticism in and between some of his male characters. There’s also the most succinct description of ‘male bonding’ I’ve yet encountered:"They had gotten themselves into a potentially dangerous situation, and they deliberately had done it deliberately. It made Grant think of certain things that had happened to him during the war. He didn’t say it was smart, or intelligent, but he liked it. . . . not since the old days in the Navy in the war had he felt so affectionately close to any group of men. He felt, and it was shared, a real warmth of really deep affection for all three of them. And he didn’t need to be ashamed of it. It was something you could never explain to any woman and, he realized, something no woman would ever be able to understand."It appears that his protagonist Ron Grant's affair with the older Carol Abernathy may well have been based on an actual affair in Jones's past, except that Jones and his married lover (and her husband) attempted a writer's colony rather than an amateur theater group.10/14: tAlmost half-way through, and while I’m still engrossed, I’m also wearying just a bit of the various angsts of the various characters and their relationships - the novel's bloat is making itself felt.10/16: As do many novels that are over-written and over-long, this one sags in the middle.10/17: This novel was published in 1967, the year after Jacqueline Susann's VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and Harold Robbins's THE ADVENTURERS established a new level of frankness about sexual matters in novels. So GO TO THE WIDOW-MAKER has a great many four-letter words and a number of sex scenes, although such scenes are not particularly prolonged or described in gratuitous detail.10/18: Finished it: the final third is an excruciating catalog of drinking, eating, more drinking, diving and sex, all of which prolonged the length of the book but added very little to the narrative itself. By the novel's end I was pretty happy to leave all of the characters behind me.I'm honestly wondering if a reader new to Jones, and completely unacquainted with his previous novels, or that he had won the National Book Award for FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, would be inspired to seek them out after reading this one as their introduction to him.
