Wild Blue: The Novel of the Us

This bulky novel about the U.S. Air Force from its creation in 1947 to 1978 was composed, we are told, on the writers' personal computersa fact possibly responsible, in part, for its undistinguished style and lack of sustained tension. Boyne (one-time USAF career officer and author of several books on flying) and Thompson (Air Force ""brat'' and author of three thrillers) seem admirably qualified to capture and novelize what Thompson calls the ``closed culture'' of the USAF. Yet their all-too-comprehensive storywhich follows the fortunes of a handful of airmen (and their families), among them an egotistic careerist carrying on family tradition, a thrill-seeker and a blackwhips the reader back and forth between America and Europe, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East, covering the labors of ground crews, aerial combat, hazardous test flights, Pentagon infighting and racial friction and has about it a cranked-out quality that makes relatively dull reading. Excitements there are (if too brief and too few); the characters seem real (if none are memorable); and there is authentic detail aplenty. What the authors have signally failed to come up with is the imagination that might have turned sociomilitary history into genuine drama. 75,000 ad/promo; author tour. (October 16)