SOURCE: Hannah, James. “This Boy's War.” Nation 259, no. 17 (21 November 1994): 618-20.

In the following essay, Hannah examines In Pharaoh's Army in conjunction with Wolff's other books, emphasizing how this particular memoir represents a continuation of recurring themes in the author's body of work.

In an interview conducted in 1989 by Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver and published in Contemporary Literature, the writer Tobias Wolff concedes that in his short fiction Vietnam remains mostly in the background, a place soldiers are leaving for or have returned from. When asked if it is difficult to write about Vietnam directly, Wolff replies: “Part of the problem is that the war novel in American literature is one of the most powerful inheritances we have. The writer of a first-rate novel about Vietnam is going to have to invent a novel that will escape the pull of convention, instead of writing a World War II...