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Books Like Matterhorn
What to read after Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn (2010) is the most complete American military novel about Vietnam — technically precise, emotionally devastating, and written by a Marine combat veteran over thirty years. If you were drawn to its portrait of what infantry combat is actually like and what it does to the people who survive it, these novels will find you in the same territory.
- 1Buy
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Alpha Company in Vietnam — O'Brien's short story cycle is the companion to Matterhorn in Vietnam War fiction; where Marlantes gives you the full tactical and physical reality of infantry combat, O'Brien gives you the same experience refracted through a literary narrator who asks whether it can be told truly at all; the two books are often read together as the essential pair of Vietnam War fiction
- 2Buy
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
A German soldier in the trenches of World War One — the most important earlier European military novel in the tradition Matterhorn belongs to; where Marlantes shows Vietnam from the inside of a Marine platoon, Remarque shows the Western Front from the inside of a German infantry unit; the two novels bracket a half-century of military literature with the same fundamental moral seriousness
- 3Buy
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman
The Eastern Front panorama — Grossman's massive novel of the Battle of Stalingrad shows what Matterhorn shows at the scale of armies and families and political systems rather than a single platoon; where Marlantes gives you the experience of a company of Marines, Grossman gives you the experience of a civilization at war
- 4Buy
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Frederick Henry in the Italian campaign of World War One — Hemingway's novel is an earlier version of the same tradition; where Marlantes is exhaustive and technically detailed, Hemingway is compressed and underwritten; both novels are about the impossibility of finding conventional meaning in the experience of combat
- 5Buy
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Yossarian trying to get out of flying more bombing missions in World War Two — the satirical approach to the military experience that Matterhorn approaches through psychological realism; Heller exaggerates the military's institutional irrationality to the point of surrealism; Marlantes shows the same institutional irrationality in documentary detail; both are devastating critiques of military bureaucracy at the expense of human life
- 6Buy
Redeployment
by Phil Klay
Short stories about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, told from multiple perspectives — Klay is the Karl Marlantes of the post-9/11 wars; a Marine veteran himself, he writes about the experience of combat and homecoming with the same moral seriousness and technical accuracy that Marlantes brought to Vietnam; the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction about the contemporary American military
- 7Buy
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
An American infantry platoon on a fictional Pacific island in World War Two — Mailer's first novel and still one of the most important American military novels; like Matterhorn, it gives you the full social texture of a combat unit — the ethnic and class composition, the command structure, the random distribution of courage and cowardice — and refuses the consolation of military heroism
- 8Buy
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, surviving the firebombing of Dresden — the anti-war tradition that Matterhorn belongs to, expressed in a completely different formal register; where Marlantes is rigorously realist, Vonnegut is surrealist and metafictional; both novels are moral arguments against war that proceed from the irreducible particularity of what combat actually does to human bodies
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