Philip Caputo has written a celebrated memoir ("A Rumor of War") and a novel about the meaningless horror of modern war ("Horn of Africa"). He works the same territory again in his new novel, "DelCorso's Gallery."

Nicholas DelCorso, a Vietnam veteran turned combat photographer, wants to show the public the true face of war. It has become an obsession with him, an attempted expiation of a momentary sin of callousness, a crusade that seems inexplicable and tasteless to P. X. Dunlop, his former mentor. (pp. 14-15)

With bemused revulsion, he watches DelCorso photographing mangled corpses. Their rivalry, the emotional center of this book, reaches its climax in Beirut, a place so awful that even the professional action junkies, the war correspondents, have difficulty sustaining their macho existential pose….

Mr. Caputo writes with all the subtlety of a punch to the gut, but his descriptions of combat photographers and...