[Going After Cacciato] is a highly idealistic work and a surprisingly lyrical one, offering a grittily beautiful picture of a war none of the participants seem to support or understand, and a vision of peace, of transcendence, which turns American involvement in Vietnam into merely a hellish way station on the road to potential salvation. (p. 603)

O'Brien's journey has more of the surrealism of Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, another novel about a group search, than of the grim facts of Gloria Emerson or Michael Herr, yet it is his factuality that gives the book its eeriness. He creates a twentieth century picaresque, replete with comic touches …, hairbreadth escapes, and people representative of the spectrum of humanity. Because of the ascending movement of the journey—the trip goes up into the mountains and to Laos, India, Iran, Turkey, Athens, and Paris—it also conveys O'Brien's conception of progress...