Title: Rally Round the Flag Boys
Author: Max Shulman
Date: 1957
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: none
Length: 278 pages
Quote: "Here begins a tale of action and passion, a guts-and-glory story of men with untamed hearts, of women with raging juices."
That's a joke; if you can read it as funny, you'll enjoy the rest of the novel. This is a comic novel about a young Army officer whose mission is to persuade a small New England town to accept its new Army base; his fiancee, a future teacher with her head full of 1950s psychological theories; a more or less happily married man who doesn't want to grow up; his wife, who copes with waiting for him to grow up by taking on ever more civic responsibilities; a teenaged girl who'd be tempted to run around with boys if she felt less contempt for the boys she knows; her main admirer, a teenager who would like to be regarded as a delinquent but who has so far managed only to become a jerk; a soldier who was a rising country music star before he was drafted; a mean, grumpy man who'd be miserably married to anyone at all, and his wife, who seems nicer than he is, but only because she's better-looking; and a Little League team who have to cope with the question of whether the "scrub" players really want an equal amount of time on the field.
It's Max Shulman, the author of "Dobie Gillis" and "The Tender Trap," so you know the comedy will be heavy-handed and burdened with tedious 1950s lubricity. If you can stand that, you may enjoy a story in which, even during a rumble disguised as part of a play, the soldiers don't use any Army Language at all. The characters in this book are tempted by adultery and murder, but not by profanity.
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