This study resurrects important historical information about the mobilization of the US during World War I and seeks to apply it to a study of The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, and later novels by Arthur Miller, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs. The basic historical argument centres on the intelligence tests and psychological measures used by the US military in 1917–18 to identify the best recruits, especially officer material, and to weed out “feeble-minded” and otherwise incapable troops. In the concentrated effort to engineer an efficient fighting force, America thereby created a temporary meritocracy for ethnic males (although not blacks). The military services also promoted physical and moral purity among its men, a losing battle considering the temptations of “charity girls,” who offered sex to soldiers at US training camps, and of Frenchwomen after the Army arrived in Europe. After the war came a backlash against this class and ethnic meritocracy, shown in the severe immigration acts of the 1920s, the quotas restricting admissions of Jews and Catholics into US medical schools, and the ethnically biased sociological studies used to promote eugenic laws. Gandal also points to the opportunities for sexual license during the war as a major factor in creating more open moral attitudes towards sexuality in the 1920s, and women's promiscuity in particular. The author's chief claim here is that, while the backlash is well documented, the significant gains of ethnic soldiers during the war have been largely overlooked, and the work of three key American modernist writers reflects this historical moment. In a related argument, he also asserts that New Criticism's focus on style has misdirected literary criticism away from plot and character, while New Historicism (especially recent work by Walter Benn Michaels), with its wide emphasis on discourse and applied historical practice, has misjudged the importance of personal factors in historicist literary analysis, a flaw best corrected by close attention to biography.

The essential literary argument, therefore, is based on biography and is directed at plot and character in the selected novels. The critic asserts that the 1920s fiction of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner was not driven by war trauma but rather by a “mobilization wound” suffered when, to different degrees, the authors were rejected by the military and found themselves surpassed by ethnic males because of the Army's egalitarian testing programme. Moreover, in the plots and characterizations of Gatsby, Sun, and Sound, these writers demonstrate their regret about not achieving higher military status by presenting ethnic characters such as Gatsby, whose promotion to captain in training camp reflects the historical circumstances, and whose death represents the postwar backlash of the Anglo elite – and of Fitzgerald himself, whose part-Irish ancestry allowed him to express mixed feelings about Gatsby through the narration of Nick Carraway.

In outline, these arguments contain potentially valuable lines of investigation and analysis, and the author does present some insightful interpretations of how the seduction motif in nineteenth-century American literature is transformed in modernist fiction through gender reversals that depend on the demasculinization of characters such as Jake Barnes in Sun and on the promiscuity of female characters such as Lady Brett Ashley, who can select other partners who match the new criteria for manhood established by the Army during the war, men such as Robert Cohn.

However, while Gandal is keen to attack formalist and New Historicist critics for their misguided and inadequate perspectives on World War I modernist literature – as well as the three main novelists for their obfuscation and racism, high modernism for its style-based conjuring tricks, and revisionist historians for undervaluing the impact of the war in fomenting the 1920s sexual revolution – his own study is a minefield of critical hazards. He quotes, in relation to Carl Brigham's racially biased analysis of the wartime intelligence-testing data, the conclusion that it is “a study in finding what you are looking for” (163–64), and the quotation is particularly apt here. The Gun and the Pen demonstrates a forced historicist approach to literary criticism, compounded by inadequately researched, unsubstantiated (if not altogether unprovable) biographical assertion, and a sometimes astonishing disregard for more plausible interpretations of the novel texts.

Thus, in Gandal's reading, “Benjy, with his mental age of 3, might never have passed examination at the local board, which disqualified Faulkner for his size” (154); Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are too unimaginative to “engage in sexual alternatives to intercourse” (149), a critical lapse that misses a famous instance of omission in the text; Gatsby is a “cold-blooded killer” (119) who had premarital sex with Daisy while he was in training camp (113); and Daisy was a charity girl (with no reference to her status as a southern belle and all of the flirtatious freedom and sexual constraint that entails). Furthermore, we learn that Jake Barnes is Hemingway's alter ego, while Benjy and Quentin Compson are both alter egos for Faulkner. Challenging the intentional fallacy, the critic uses the present tense to write about the authors as if they were literary characters in a theoretical plot (137, 141, 155, 158), while some convoluted explanations are given to untangle actual plots and characterizations from his overarching theory (156, 159). Tellingly, he misinterprets Matthew Bruccoli's careful biographical remarks about Zelda Fitzgerald's flirtation with the French airman Edouard Jozan and somehow proves the unknowable, stating that Zelda had an affair with Jozan, to illustrate part of the critic's thesis about female promiscuity and the threat it posed for Scott Fitzgerald (173). This tendency to make perception and assertion into facts to fit theory is also shown in the way accepted critical views about modernism's disruption of plot become for this critic simply “modernist plotlessness” (60). Gandal's study does deserve high marks for its archival research, historical understanding, and reassessment of established views. But readers will also have deep reservations about the author's critical assumptions and the restricted vision of a project that aspires to open up a new field of enquiry but mainly serves a closed agenda.