Exiles

Writer Philip Caputo masters here the difficult but powerful novella form--one that combines the economy and exactness of the short story with the momentum and weight of the novel--to create the three superb narratives that make up Exiles. The stories (titled "Standing In," "Paradise," and "In The Forest of the Laughing Elephant," and telling the stories of a barber in Connecticut, a shipwreck survivor on a wild Australian coast, and a squad of American soldiers in the Vietnamese jungle, respectively) are unrelated on the surface--but all three travel in a weird emotional terrain of alienation reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor.