Update: 26 April 2019: Having reread this, I think it appropriate to upgrade it a bit. Why? The imagery over the past nine or ten months has remained strong. The novel has a presence that outweighs the tortured tough guy talk. Still, the Vietnam portion is far better than the Lebanese one. Caputo has created a startlingly unsympathetic character in Nick Delcorso.
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Original Review:

Despite the impact and immediacy of his Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo is at best a mediocre novelist. Delcorso's Gallerly exemplifies all his weaknesses. It's filled with trite tough guy talk and clunky, awkward attempts at hardboiled similes that make Mickey Spillane sound like Shakespeare. Nor does the form of the novel redeem the story. The first part, set in 1975, describes the fall of Saigon and the final days of the Vietnam War. Part two, then, after mirroring the first part's focus on Delcorso's trouble-filled marriage, then alights in Beirut for the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. The separation is ragged and unsatisfying. The reader needs to reset once again, after being virtually cut off from any resolution of events in Saigon.

The portions of the novel devoted to Delcorso's relationship with his wife, Maggie, are particularly hard to take. They are shallow and cliched. More than anything else, they disrupt the flow of the story. Not to mention, it is often in these passages that Delcorso fantasizes about his dead-end career as a boxer. Throughout the book, all I could think of is Marlon Brando and On the Waterfront. So it was no surprise when Caputo pulled out a reference to the film and its most famous lines, "I couldda been a contender." It's one thing to see this imagery continually plastered over the face of Delcorso from the very beginning of the story. But it's hamfisted when the author feels so insecure that he needs to spell it out to the reader specifically.

I suppose that is the weakness of this novel. Its insistence on "truth," in the end, becomes a preachy sort of literalism that leaves little room for the reader's imagination, something that is much needed, because Caputo does an especially poor job of establishing a sense of fictional space. Whether in Saigon, New York City, or Beirut, there is no atmosphere but the one mainly wrapping itself around Delcorso's inner mindscape.

One thing Caputo does do well is capture the tone and feeling of the decade in which the book was written, the 1980s, and not when it was set, in the 1970s. Caputo himself had helped usher in the subgenre of Vietnam War literature. And you can feel the spirit of the times flow through the pages. The simultaneous need for redemption and the utter distrust of the folly that sent Americans to the Southeast Asia to fight an unwinnable war--at least as Caputo sees it. The novel is a masterpiece of revealed cynicism that is even cynical about its own cynicism.

Finally, it is worth comparing Delcorso's Gallery with Christopher Koch's Highways to a War. Both novels have as their main protagonist a war photographer caught up in Saigon in the closing days of the war. And both use multiple perspectives from other war photographers and correspondents to tell part of the story. They also plop their heroes down into another civil war immediately after the fall of Saigon. And, finally, both main protagonists suffer similar fates at books' ends. The difference is that Koch's work is an underrated and largely unknown literary masterpiece of this genre. His sweep and scope is epic. And his sense of setting and atmosphere is so sensual and overwhelming that readers feel they are in Southeast Asia or Tasmania. It is a vast journey of physical, psychological, and moral travails. It's everything that Caputo tried but failed to do in Delcorso's Gallery, although it should be noted that Delcorso's Gallery was first published in 1983, some twelve years before Highways to a War. So, if there is any direct influence or connection, it would be Delcorso's Gallery on Hgihways to a War, not the other way around. ( )

Caputo was in Vietnam as a soldier, and later as a journalist, so he has no shortage of authority on his topic. But his Pulitzer was for a memoir; this novel isn’t anywhere near that league. It’s just plain clumsy.

Former combat photographer Nick DelCorso has retired into a quieter career in commercial photography, but that old itch refuses to fade. When he’s offered a job covering the final NorthVietnamese assault on Saigon, he can’t pass it up. Off he goes, leaving wife and family, to battle what the cliché mongers sell as “personal demons” in the streets of Saigon. DelCorso can’t rest until he atones for his past.

How clumsy can it get? Consider this, as the press corps huddles in a hallway during an air raid: “The terrifying noises had stripped them of the mask of cynical nonchalance war correspondents usually wear to conceal their true feelings, if they have any.”

Sentences like this abound.

There is no point Caputo is unwilling to drive home with a sledgehammer. When he isn’t telling us how things are, he’s explaining his characters’ improbably lucid thoughts. And when his characters aren’t thinking, they’re making little speeches to each other, such as this conversation, in a brothel:

“First it’s Biafra this, Belfast that, then it’s so many piasters for a short-time, so many for all night. It’s all bullshit.”

“Exactly what is bullshit?”

“This is, we are. We call ourselves photographers, photojournalists when we get high-toned about it, but what are we really? Mercenaries who carry cameras instead of guns.”

Wilson rolled his eyes.

So did the reader, reflecting that “This is, we are” was a fine bit of technical flash: the characters commenting on the author’s text. It’s a postmodern masterpiece!

Perhaps not.

Unfortunately, Caputo can’t find ways to dramatize his ideas effectively. Everything must be explained; nothing arises through the action itself. It’s too bad, because the novel tries to explore war photography and our changing attitudes towards war in an interesting way.

DelCorso seems to be a composite of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, two of the new wave of war photographers that arose out of Vietnam. His arch-rival and former mentor, Dunlop, recalls David Douglas Duncan (who is never mentioned in the text), whose career took off in an earlier era.

Dunlop’s war looks heroic, DelCorso’s squalid and ugly; Dunlop is an artifact of WWII, and DelCorso belongs indisputably to Vietnam. Dunlop wants to find meaning in war, and show it to the reader. DelCorso wants to assault the reader’s complacent assumptions. To DelCorso, Dunlop is a fossil; to Dunlop, our hero is a pornographer.

The novel continually touches on all the questions that plague war photography: exploitation, responsibility, the pornography of violence. It’s unfortunate that it can’t find a more effective dramatic footing.