Feb 18 08 08:58a p.1

17 Febrnary 2008

Ivan,

Here's the second half of one hell of a book. Now that I've had a couple of weeks with it I can also say it's proving to have haunting qualities as well-it is really staying with me and I find myself thinking of it at odd moments. You've managed, among other things, an incredibly panoramic sense of the war -- very tough to pull off, but the vehicle of Ben's peregrinations manages to convey a much larger whole through each of his excursions, every one of which packs an incredible wallop.

I do think a brief acknowledgments or note on background would be welcome to many readers including me. You are so successful at melding the history-based and the purely imaginative here that when it was done I wanted to know a little more about which was which. And the women's and WWII buff audiences have big potential here.

Just a few points that you'll encounter on the second half pages that may be worth calling out:

" . 227, "Ben prickled at the remark ... shoulder wound": This didn't utterly ring true to

me - I couldn't see why he'd take it as a jab or even be particularly sensitive to it, especially at this moment.

~'Angelides watched him at this. Ben looked overcome." : Wait on this, I think, and fet Animal's taking stock ofhim materialize a few lines later- seems intrusive he~e when we are in Ben's thoughts.

~"How could the knowledgeable man ... Dex Carlston" : I think this is more spelled out than it needs to be. We know Ben well by now and understand the consistency of his attitude, especially as it has been sharpened by his TPWP experience. His dialogue says the rest.

2j.O, "Angelides' times at this . . . the one against the other": I know what you mean here -but it's awfully cryptic on first reading ~ make it a little plainer?

2 ,~'facial contribution" soURds odd to me •'

,? ~/'

247, "That clout of yours ... submarine games": You lost me here a little - Ben gets Prokosch leave for the funeral to get him off that dangerous coast for 48 hours - or so he can see his girlfriend again, just in case he doesn't survive? I think this needs to be a little clearer- I think what's throwing me off is that the way Ben presents it to Cass it sounds as ifhe thinks he's significantly intervened in Prokosch's fate - saved him from "submarine games" instead of done what little he can to catch him a break given his new apprehension of Prokosch's dangerous circumstances.

Feb 18 08 08:58a

and elsewhere: I get that in general, thoughts are in italics throughout) and dialogue remembered in thought is in italic and quotes. However, here and other places where you actually flash back to a scene so that it is playing in "real time" in the text, I don't think you need the itals - in other words, where you as narrator are revisiting the scene rather than only a character revisiting a moment.

~' "Out of the mists of feminine scenery ... rnb a dub dub": Don't think you need this and especially Adrianna - she has receded by now and it feels forced to bring her up agam.

I think there are some inconsistencies in capitalization throughout, incidentally, that I haven't been too carefully on the lookout for - "captain," corporal," etc used in address -in general, you seem to prefer lowercase and so do I but there's an occasional cap for these. The Senator is an exception throughout, yes? Also Jeep/jeep and maybe a couple others - I can ask copyeditor to keep an eye peeled for these.

Looking fotward to getting this back as soon as possible, Ivan, and do send along disks for this part as well.

Also, please do supply what you can in the way of author's questionnaire - no need to reinvent the wheel, just whatever would be useful from a publicity standpoint. In the meantime, I've included draft catalogue copy here - whale away at it but please do respond to~ first, as the catalogue is moving along quickly. We' ll pick some blurbs from Whistling Season to run along with this- let me know if you have favorites you'd like us to use.

All best,

p.2

Further corrections on lst half of Eleventh man ms:

p. 15--in Victor Rennie's military mailing address, change 11th Regiment to 26th Regiment.

p. 29--delete "tin-colored"

p. 56--last line, change "the weather is bastardly" to "the weather is bad half the time and worse the rest"

p. 93--delete "Christ,"

p.131--change "Three time zones" to "A couple of time zones"

p. 142--change "bastards" to "damn things"

p. 158--change to Roman type as shown on photocopied page, and lower down, insert new italic line as shown

:: by 1' 11 Doig §BY ii· ·~ :z ~IVAN ~I D . :;; ~ DOIG,e van 01g

BY I~ DOIG by~ CQ

17277 15th Avenue N. W, Seattle, Washington 98177 (206) 542-6658

one-page fax to Becky Saletan, Publisher, Harcourt

Dear Becky--

Since we' re moving at warp speed on the ms, I figured I'd better provide you some quick thoughts before Carol and I have to abandon the house again. Our water's being shut off, we'll be out (on hardship duty such as eating cioppino for lunch) from about 1 p.m. your time until 5 or so.

The main thing: I'm overnighting the first half of the ms, plus disks, to you. If the second half reaches me tomorrow and your touching-up of it is no more extensive than it has b~en so far, I should be able to get it back to you Monday mom, or maybe Friday mornmg.

Other stuff:

If it would make a substantial difference in helping the book, I am game to go to the · BEA, given that it's out here on the Left Coast. As you know, it's the grind of a booktour

I do not want to take on, but a few days at a time, if the plane flight isn't ungodly long, I'm perfectly capable of. You and Laurie decide, okay? Also, if there's ever any time I'd be helpful in your meetings with bookselling honchoes--Borders, Amazon, regional booksellers, whoever--! can be enlisted.

Though I'm shying away from a national tour, I can do readings/signings at some of the usual suspects out here, roughly Portland to Bellingham. Included in that could be Pennie's prime Costco stores here in the area, perhaps just at the leading edge of the holidays. You mentioned San Francisco; I think we'd need a speaking gig to make that pay off in media attention and sales. If Laurie has any ideas, I'll listen. I can also contact someone I know at a speaker's agency there, when I'm done wresting the ms, if we want to pursue San Francisco.

Am I still in the magical publicity hands of Michelle? I have two Whistling Season events on my schedule, one in Dowagiac, Michigan, May 9, for a major speaking fee (I kid you not; they've had Mailer, Updike, etc.) and one practically here in my backyard in a suburb called Edmonds, Oct. 3, that I should give her some details on.

One ms question. I'm going to have a couple of pages of acknowledgments. Are they needed when the ARCs are being set up, or do I have more time than that? Maybe I can whip them out with the rest of the reworked ms, but am not sure; can hurry 'em if need be.

All for now. Talk to you as need be.

12 Feb. '08

Dear Becky--

Here you go, your changes and mine in the first half of the ms. Most of mine come from fact-checking or using the FIND command to count the number of times is used certain words or phrases. People do a lot less of shaking their heads, casting a glance, taking a deep breath and so on in this pass.

As to your points:

Ch. 1: I don't really get the problem of eliding to Bill's point of view on p. 3--1 was actually showing the reader there that there will be cinematic shifts of that sort--but maybe my change of "Bill saw" to "Bill could see" takes care of it, I hope? P. 15, we can just do away with the passage in question.

--I've changed Ben's not outright saying (to the reader) what happened to Vic, to gradual revelation of how bad it was, the leg off. So I've feathered those references in on p. 7, p. 16, and reworked the Tom Harry bit on p. 22.

--PP. 28-34: I have no big objection to the past perfects, beyond my general philosophy that'd and had look kind of flyspecky to me. Anyway, okay.

Ch. 4: Yes, TPWP does want every man included in the Supreme Team series, even Dex, by Ben shucking and jiving, "Loudmouthing" it, with some reminiscence of football days and vague reference to Dex serving with all the rest. Ben wants to get to Dex to see if he's going to stick with conscientious objector status. Seems to me pp. 82-83 indicate all this, but I've plugged in one more sentence on p. 83 to try to underscore Ben's situation.

A few general things: Kool-Aid has been around since 1929. I had the wrong little railroad town for Prokosch to be from, so Zurich has been changed to Devon. On p. 31 the runner who fetches Ben to the general is from not the day room but the orderly room (i.e., he's an orderly), a possibly miscontruable term (what, different from the mussy room?) I don't like to see on the page but it's the only thing the damn place is called in the military and I think we'd better use it to be right.

Now about the floppy disks. I'm breaking the ms into four of them, approximately a hundred pages each, to make sure the transcriber has room on the disk to make the changes--the little buggers gobble space in a hurry when you're reworking something, I've found. I hope all this will suffice okay--1 simply did not have the time or temperament to try to learn a new computer while wrapping up this ms this rapidly.

Best,

Harcourt TRADE PUBLISHERS

Rebecca Saletan Vice President Publisher, Adult Trade

8 February 2008

Dear Ivan,

Here's the first 8 chapters, almost exactly half. I want to take the weekend to take one more pass through the second half and will ship that out on Monday.

As you'll see, there's uncharacteristically few scratch marks on these pages -you know I'm not a shy editor but even by the standards of your usually crystal prose I found this exceptionally sparkling. The pacing feels lively and variable in a good way, the dialogue spot on, the descriptions the best perhaps you have ever written. It's a glorious book, Ivan.

So aside from the odd deleted line or word change, which here will have to count for heavy lifting on my part, here's a few slightly more significant comments on this half:

Chapter 1: There are a couple of spots where the narrative elides from Ben's point of view to his father's in a way that seemed a little sloppy rather than deliberate to me - see pp. 3 and 15 with suggested changes. On p. 16 it happens again, with Bill reading Ben's stories, but that one doesn't bother me - the shift feels right there. See if you agree.

Chapter 2: I know the suspense of the chapter depends on it to a degree, but it bothers me that Ben doesn't appear to tell Tom Harry that Vic's injured but not dead. (The impression I got from the dialogue with the father made me think his father thought Vic was dead too, but looking back I see that Ben tells him, we just don't know what he says. Maybe introduce similar ambiguity with Tom?

28-34: flashback to meeting Cass here made tracking the timing slightly confusing, to me. I bookended it with past perfects to try to delineate a little more clearly - see if co­editor Carol thinks that suffices.

Chapter 3, pp 63, 70 and elsewhere further on: Are permissions needed for these fabulous WWII songs?

rebecca .saletan@harcourt.com • www.HarcourtBooks.com

15 East 26th Street • New York, NY 10010 • tel 212•592•1178 fax 212•592•1010

A Harcourt Education Company

Chapter 4: Why does TPWP want Ben to write about Dex if they know he's a CO? Is it that they're so wedded to the Supreme Team idea that they want every man included and are just determined that Ben mask his status? I guess it's unclear to me what TPWP' s attitude toward that status would be and how they expect or want Ben to deal with it -maybe I missed something but maybe there's a way this could be made a little more clear.

That's all for now- the rest, such as it is, on the pages themselves.

Let's chat when you have a sec about how you want to manage the changes-ifwe're serious about getting ARCs in time for BEA it probably makes sense to go straight to galleys and introduce copyediting there. That would mean your keeping track of changes from this point on and sending me a disk for the manuscript as it stands (which Liz is dying for too) instead of generating a clean set with changes incorporated. Think it over and let's chat. I'm in Boston on Monday and Tuesday a.m., then back here. If you want to reach me easily, these days cell is often the best way, 347 782 1410.

All best,

PS Thanks for sending those terrific photos.

Putting on the uniform of your country and submitting your life to a war's blind chances of

who lives and who dies is one of the most powerful experiences a person can have. I grew

up around men, and a few women, of World War II in our rural western county; 273

served in that war, out of a population of less than two thousand. One of my uncles had

been a torpedo man on a destroyer in the Pacific, another was in the Montana National

Guard contingent sent to New Guinea, and in the saloons where my father did the hiring

for his ranch crews were regulars who had been in the thick of the war; and of course,

there were the gaps in families and the community left by those killed in the war. So, even

then there was a hovering sense of the war's great toll on Montana, as its leading historians

would later write: "As in World War I, Montana contributed more than its share of military

manpower--roughly forty thousand men by 1942--and the state's death rate in the war was

exceeded only by New Mexico's."

When my tum came, my own military service as Sergeant Doig was not in combat,

but at the edge of war's dice-throw: as an Air Force reservist on active duty during the

Cuban missile crisis, and later narrowly missing assignment to Vitenam. The military

version of fate, then, has been part of my own life and naturally works its powers in my

writing. In my Montana trilogy, characters go to both world wars and Vietnam as a matter

of course, and it was probably when I was gathering material for my book about my own

family's World War II experience, Heart Earth, that I lucked onto some mention of a

Montana college football team that had all gone into the war, with terrible loss. I saw in

that the storyline for a novel: what if you were the eleventh man, trying to dodge as fate

closed in on that team; one by one?

As ever, in this book I generate my fiction from historical set points--in this case,

the pivotal war years 1943-44--while making up my plot and people. Thus, within the

wilder boundaries of my imagination I still abide by historical laws of gravity, researching

events and details to the best of my Ph.D.-in-history ability. But delving into oral history

accounts, memoirs, military unit histories and the like is just that, delving. The constant is

the crafting of the language, the telling of a story in a way no one has ever heard told

before. "Fiction lives by the energy of its prose," the novelist Thomas Flanagan boiled it

down to. I couldn't agree more.

As to current issues and newsworthiness, two words say it all: Iraq and

Afghanistan.

19 Feb. '08

Dear Becky--

Okay, the final frenzy of ms corrections, over to you. I've divided this second half of the ms into three disks--more about that in a moment.

--Since we're doing acknowledgments, I did 'em up fully: three pages that are now at the end of the ms and the pertinent disk. Carol was on your side about the actual football team and the WASPs. and you're both right. She chipped in the idea that my own military experience ought to be cited, and I've done a short and I hope piquant graf on that. Now that the acknowledgments are ready, I believe they should go in the ARCs for the edification of booksellers, reviewers, anybody we're trying to impress.

--I've hashed together the author's questionnaire and it' s in with the rest of this batch. I can refine it if need be.

--As I kept plowing along on fact-checking, I came up with a handful of further small corrections in the first half of the ms. They're enclosed on a list, with photocopies of of the pages and the editings.

--As I mentioned on the phone earlier, and have tried to flag every way I could think of on the ms and disks, pp. 240A-B-C and p. 313A would upset the overall pagination if they're entered with the other pages, and so I've put them in separate icons on the disks, for insertion after all else has been dealt with. In a real pinch, they can be typed in, huh? The disks were done on Word 6.0.1, on my Power Mac 7200/75, if that helps with the computer situation.

--Will you please see to it that Liz gets an electronic copy of the ms as pronto as possible? And better send me a disk of the corrected ms, too, on the chance I can use it if I manage to upgrade to a new computer (which almost certainly will be a Mac, although not of the floppy disk vintage).

--You noted that neither of us was super-diligent about capitalization consistency, but there is one word I worked on: my dictionary gives "jeep" lowercase, and let's just do it that way (and make the copyeditor do it that way).

Separate topic: just for the sheer damn fun of it, would you kindly have Tom mail me (because if we periodically flee the house because of the sewer construction noise I won't be around to flip on the fax) the latest sales records of the Whistling Season paperback?

Lastly, I would really like to have the enclosed dedication on the ARCs as well as the book, okay? Time to celebrate, you with the pencil.

All best, again and still,