Dispatching Your Patient's Patience

I must say that there are some parts of this novel that really catch my interest, including such vivid images as the helicopter ride-along with the corpses, the false alarm the narrator felt when he was kicked in the face, and many others, but something in the way the novel is written loses me. I read a lot of fiction from many different genres and I have come to find that pacing is very important. If a novel is not paced well, mixing in blocks of description and dialogue and inner dialogue well enough to keep it flowing, most people's interest will be lost quicker than you can clear a Vietnamese restaurant by firing an AK-47. But, for me, it takes a lot to get me to daydream in the middle of a novel. I am easy. I love to read and it doesn't take much to keep my interest. This was why I find it odd that Dispatches loses my interest so easily. Yes, there is a lot going on in my life and my mind is constantly elsewhere, but that isn't the problem here. The author doesn't have a clear progression of scenes early on in the novel. It is almost as if the narrator jumps from scene to scene without telling the reader that it is doing so, putting in dialogue that is hard for the reader to decipher who is speaking, putting in large paragraphs of what seems to be simply rants and raves and merely commentary on subjects rather than just telling the story. The author doesn't tell a narrative. He slams in some narrative scenes every once in a while, but in general it is almost as if we are just hearing the inner monologue of this one reporter. Most of what I have read is just his thought and reactions. He does have some short snippets of interactions with soldiers, but even those were just monologues. There weren't any actual conversations with them that I can recall off the top of my head. For me, that is the book's biggest downfall during the first 50 pages: it is merely flashes of a few interesting scenes filled in with extraneous information slammed with his opinions on multiple topics. I haven't made it past that as of this moment, but I will be reading the rest of the 80 page assignment before bed. I really hope the story does pick up and take off, the first 50 or so pages just being a setup. I have read many different genres, but I have not read many books on war. I read the book "Jarhead" which was recently turned into a movie. It is based in the Desert Shield / Storm era. It had a much clearer progression of plot. I would suggest it to anyone looking for a good war novel. It is fast paced, interesting, thought provoking, and is even political. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't really comment on that. I'm enjoying the book somewhat, but it is really trying my patience when the author gets "rambly."