Books: Another Hemingway

THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPET (308 pp.) —Leicester Hemmingway — Henry Holt ($3.50).

Many a novelist has tried to be another Hemingway. A 38-year-old ex-newspaperman has long held this distinction without trying: Leicester Hemingway is Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother. A commercial fisherman and builder of boats, he looks like Ernest and, like Ernest, has gone to war and written about it.

His first novel, The Sound of the Trumpet, is a fictionalized report of his G.I. experience between D-day and the end of the war. It focuses on Danforth Granham, a G.I. cameraman in a documentary film unit, later an infantry photographer, as he shoots his way across France and into Germany, his shutter open to combat and corpses, his arms briefly closed around the Red Cross girl of his dreams. The result of all this picture-taking is a series of dramatically unrelated clichés which add up to a minor war document disguised as a novel. What Leicester Hemingway chiefly demonstrates is the importance of being Ernest.