NP--Book review-V related (LONG)

[Spencer Thiel]

Here's a review of a book of stories about life in the Navy by an author
with a very Pynchonesque name.  Thought some might be interested........


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>From "Holt Uncensored" by Pat Holt http://www.nciba.com/patholt.html


WHITE HATS: Stories of the U.S. Navy before World War II by Floyd Beaver
(Glencannon, 800-711-8985; 244 pages; $17.95 paperback):

As he did in "The Homeward Bounder and Other Stories," former Navy chief
petty officer Beaver can
quietly addict us to the gripping sea stories he has made it his business to
research and retell. Now with the action and suspense of wartime combat
wonderfully missing in "White Hats,"  Beaver's stories about the U.S. Navy
between wars, he concentrates on the quiet intimacy of men working together
as an
efficient machine at sea.

One expects an old-fashioned "man's man" sensibility to percolate right
through  these
stories, and it is there, but Beaver's love of shipboard technology and the
dependence of "white hats" (sailors) on each other and on the military
- and, always,  on the sea itself - brings a refreshing
authenticity to the elements his characters confront daily: fear,
God, love and loneliness bordering on cosmic isolation.

There is humor throughout, as when irreverent  signalmen are ordered
to decorate the ship with flags for Sunday religious services and arrange
the pennants to spell out the word b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t behind an unsuspecting
chaplain. And there is high drama, especially during horrendous storms, when
"the banshee shrieking of winds and the shuddering shock of
seas against a hull can be unnerving. Steel can be torn and rivets popped
and men washed over the side."

Most of the stories are set in the Great
Depression, when it was hard to get into the Navy (too many penniless men
trying to sign up), or in  the late 30s, when it was  hard to
get out (World War II was clearly on its way, these men knew). So "White
Hats" offers a surprisingly candid  look at the introspection and emotion
that seem to well up in sailors peacetime life - especially before-the-draft
sailors routinely maligned by society as  "deficient" and aberrant for
wanting to live "behind the steel walls of the Navy's ships" solely in the
company of other men.

Few writers are as knowledgeable or gifted at showing us such intricate
shipboard maneuvers as  launching an airplane off the catapults of the
signal  bridge with explosions "as loud as five-inch guns," or patrolling
the Yangstze River sniping back at snipers, or conducting maneuvers near
Pearl Harbor (all too "futile," the narrator says ruefully), or conducting a
rescue-at-sea.

Equally affecting are brutally honest scenes of heartless racism and
misogyny (old Navy saying: "Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a
whore and you won't never have no trouble with women") and heartbreaking
scenes of tenderness and care that threaten inflexible definitions of what
makes a man in this man's Navy.

Perhaps these stories make such an enduring impression because they exist in
a growing vacuum: Ever since statistics proved that women buy most of the
books in America today, publishers have  increasingly geared their lists to
the kind of Oprah Winfrey picks that used to be called "women's fiction."
It's not that "men's fiction" has been left in the dust but that the
tried-and-true men's genres - Westerns, military stories (not the
action-packed techno-thrillers) - seem to have been relegated to a smaller
and smaller niche, and that is a pity. "White Hats" - well-written,
authoritative, compelling, authentic - could do much to return good fiction
by and about good men to audiences that remain hungry for such books.

-Spencer T.