The Long Take's portrayal of PTSD seems to me to be deadly accurate. I wouldn't exactly know exactly since I haven't had first-hand experience of it or know anyone how does. I read somewhere that PTSD is the inability to remember without reliving. This book captures that sensation with great precision. Walker, the protagonist, lives such a life, drifting through it, sleepless, reliving the experiences of the war and the ones that lead up to it. And it is his intention to kill his past, but this impulse only amplifies the past's effect on him. Walker roams restlessly through cities, trying to find a place where he can stay, but the entire world seems alien to him. The alienation coming from the world's disregard as to what happened in the war and the soldiers in it. He seeks out people who have had similar experiences as him, to talk about the war in general. But when it comes right down to him, his POV of story, the past becomes weighty, it can't be told and he alienates himself from them too, although he gets back to them now and then through a span of years.
The writer's ability to describe the city of cinema in a decade, the change it goes through, the very mild insinuation that McCarthyism is one the path of becoming the new fascism, the historical events that seared into the memories of everyone of that time is one point. Better of all is the dialogue of noir- which has the danger of being exaggerated or sounding unreal- which again is precise.
Plotwise, there is nothing that is going on which is exhilarating. In case, the reader lived in the time this book is set in, then it can act as a nice dose of nostalgia. The reader is compelled to read on to know the war experiences of Walker and the others and how it affects his present. In the end, when the city is completely torn down, Walker finally feels at home, he chooses the city, perhaps because it is reminiscent of the rumble of the war he lived through.