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The Slot
This is an Authors Guild/BIP title. Please use Authors Guild/BIP specs. Author's Please use author's bio. This is the story of a P.T. Boat captain in World War II involved in the battle of Guadalcanal and his brief affair with his squadron commander's wife. It is a picture of the U.S. Navy in the dark years of war, facing defeat and victory.
292 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 10, 2021
I read The Slot because my dad had owned it, and he was in the Navy in the Solomon Islands in WW2. I've been re-reading his letters home and wanted to learn more. I accept that it's a certain type of book from its time - the women are soft and sexy and cook and make drinks, then wait for the heroic men to return. We would not accept that now. But I do think it is a fairly accurate picture of daily life of the crew of the PT boats patrolling the Slot.
October 11, 2025
A book does not have to be great to be memorable. THE SLOT is not great; it is not always even good; but it is uniformly memorable. A curious hybrid of pulp potboiler, fictive memoir, and insightful study of human nature in war, it succeeds brilliantly at none of these things but makes a credible case for all of them. I enjoyed the book, and much of it will stick with me.
Clagett served in WW2 in PT boats in the Pacific Theater, and in this novel drawn from his experiences, he puts his characters in that same hot soup. Specifically, that period of 1942 - 1943 where the U.S. Navy was slugging it out with the Imperial Japanese Fleet for control of "The Slot" -- a long narrow patch of water which had to be controlled by whoever wanted to keep the vital island of Guadalcanal. By day, the Americans controlled the Slot with superior air power; by night, it belonged mostly to the Japanese, whose surface fleet was more powerful at that time and also better adapted for night-fighting (they used, for example, smokeless powder in their heavy guns, so no gunflashes, whereas American battle lines looked, in Herman Wouk's words, "like a line of erupting volcanoes.") Still recovering from Pearl Harbor, the U.S. did not have enough surface ships to fight the Japanese and had to use PT boats to fill the gaps and run defense and offense both. These fast, heavily armed, basically unarmored vessels led short, violent lives and died equally brief and violent deaths.
THE SLOT is somewhat deceptively named. It is as much about the love lives of the main characters as it is about the war: indeed, half the book is set in New York City, where the Navy was assembling its boat fleet and training, and its personnel were trying to find love, or at least some sex, before they shipped out. In short, our hero falls for his jerk commanding officer's long-suffering wife, and they engage in a love affair, one which comes back to haunt everyone involved once hero guy arrives in the Pacific. This part of the novel is overwritten and occasionally tedious, but also spiked with looks at the nightlife and "dating scene" of early 1940s NYC, along with an interesting look at Navy culture. The action finally shifts to Guadalcanal and its surrounding islands, where our boy and his band take on the Japanese night after night, inflicting and suffering cruel losses and sitting frontrow at several terrible defeats -- Savo Island, Tassafaronga. The sheer desperation of the American position bleeds through the pages, as does the misery of these swampy, fetid islands forever being bombed and strafed by Japanese planes.
THE SLOT is an all-over-the-place novel. There is sex, affairs, private detectives, and nightclub scenes culminating in more sex, which is reminiscent of the pulp novels of that era; there is also combat and a study of sorts of the psychology of combat, especially the type where you're always outnumbered and outgunned. Our heroes are often just that; but they also crack under strain, make foolish decisions, and allow petty personal grievances to determine their actions and the fates of others and of themselves. No one is consistently anything in this book. The look at Navy culture is also very interesting: husbands vs. wives, ratings vs. officers, chiefs vs. everybody, and Naval Academy men vs. those officers who got their commissions another way.
As a novelist, Clagett is as uneven as the world he explores: some of his writing is damned good, and some of it unevocative and flat and lifeless. Sometimes the novel is a page-turner and othertimes a slog. The structure itself is curiously out of whack. I had the sense of a talented amateur, with emphasis on both "talented" and "amateur." In the end, however, I enjoyed the book and found myself deeply, almost shockingly affected by its ending. 3.5/5
Clagett served in WW2 in PT boats in the Pacific Theater, and in this novel drawn from his experiences, he puts his characters in that same hot soup. Specifically, that period of 1942 - 1943 where the U.S. Navy was slugging it out with the Imperial Japanese Fleet for control of "The Slot" -- a long narrow patch of water which had to be controlled by whoever wanted to keep the vital island of Guadalcanal. By day, the Americans controlled the Slot with superior air power; by night, it belonged mostly to the Japanese, whose surface fleet was more powerful at that time and also better adapted for night-fighting (they used, for example, smokeless powder in their heavy guns, so no gunflashes, whereas American battle lines looked, in Herman Wouk's words, "like a line of erupting volcanoes.") Still recovering from Pearl Harbor, the U.S. did not have enough surface ships to fight the Japanese and had to use PT boats to fill the gaps and run defense and offense both. These fast, heavily armed, basically unarmored vessels led short, violent lives and died equally brief and violent deaths.
THE SLOT is somewhat deceptively named. It is as much about the love lives of the main characters as it is about the war: indeed, half the book is set in New York City, where the Navy was assembling its boat fleet and training, and its personnel were trying to find love, or at least some sex, before they shipped out. In short, our hero falls for his jerk commanding officer's long-suffering wife, and they engage in a love affair, one which comes back to haunt everyone involved once hero guy arrives in the Pacific. This part of the novel is overwritten and occasionally tedious, but also spiked with looks at the nightlife and "dating scene" of early 1940s NYC, along with an interesting look at Navy culture. The action finally shifts to Guadalcanal and its surrounding islands, where our boy and his band take on the Japanese night after night, inflicting and suffering cruel losses and sitting frontrow at several terrible defeats -- Savo Island, Tassafaronga. The sheer desperation of the American position bleeds through the pages, as does the misery of these swampy, fetid islands forever being bombed and strafed by Japanese planes.
THE SLOT is an all-over-the-place novel. There is sex, affairs, private detectives, and nightclub scenes culminating in more sex, which is reminiscent of the pulp novels of that era; there is also combat and a study of sorts of the psychology of combat, especially the type where you're always outnumbered and outgunned. Our heroes are often just that; but they also crack under strain, make foolish decisions, and allow petty personal grievances to determine their actions and the fates of others and of themselves. No one is consistently anything in this book. The look at Navy culture is also very interesting: husbands vs. wives, ratings vs. officers, chiefs vs. everybody, and Naval Academy men vs. those officers who got their commissions another way.
As a novelist, Clagett is as uneven as the world he explores: some of his writing is damned good, and some of it unevocative and flat and lifeless. Sometimes the novel is a page-turner and othertimes a slog. The structure itself is curiously out of whack. I had the sense of a talented amateur, with emphasis on both "talented" and "amateur." In the end, however, I enjoyed the book and found myself deeply, almost shockingly affected by its ending. 3.5/5
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews