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Heavy Trip: A Thousand Steps

07 Monday Feb 2022

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Review: A Thousand Steps, by T. Jefferson Parker
Forge, 2022. 368 pp. $28

If you’re into the peace-love-tie-dye scene, with or without the accompanying sex and drugs, Laguna Beach, California, is the place to be in summer 1968. Timothy Leary preaches the beauty of LSD to adoring crowds, and every other person, it seems, has a different mantra of self-enlightenment.

However, sixteen-year-old Matt Anthony watches most of this from the sidelines. He’s too busy trying to put food on the table, because his mother, hooked on opium-laced hashish, can’t. His older brother, Kyle, fighting in Vietnam, worries he won’t make it out alive, and Matt worries too. Their father? He’s a deadbeat, a former cop who mouths off about discipline and keeps promising to visit one day from whatever state he’s just fled to, a lie Matt has heard for seven years.

A Pageant of the Masters tableau vivant of a chess game evoking the battle of Waterloo, 2012. Laguna Beach holds the pageant every summer, and the 1968 edition figures in the novel (courtesy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2F4cZ0Lsao, via Wikimedia Commons)

But just when life could not get worse, Matt’s older sister, Jasmine, has disappeared. At first, he thinks Jazz has merely let loose after graduating high school, but he comes to believe she’s been kidnapped. And since the police assume that Jazz is simply another drug-addled hippie on a bender, it’s up to Matt to rescue her.

How he goes about it makes for a tense, plot-driven thriller, where the ambience feels pitch-perfect. Parker captures Matt’s hand-to-mouth existence, in which he delivers newspapers practically for pennies, fishes off the rocks to get protein, and cadges meals of leftovers from friends who work in restaurant kitchens. He tries to avoid the war between cops and hippies, views anyone over thirty as “old,” and sympathizes with the antiwar protesters who chant, “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

Parker’s careful about social and cultural markers, and Matt immediately sizes up everyone he sees according to the pecking order that places him at or near the bottom, a clever touch. The only glaring false note in this otherwise exacting portrayal is how brother Kyle enlists despite drawing a safe draft lottery number, when the first lottery actually took place in late 1969. To me, overlooking that easily researchable fact suggests a characterization overreach, which I’ll get to in a moment. Otherwise, this novel has a recognizable Sixties vibe:

The store is crowded with shoppers, most young and well-haired, wearing loose clothes and smothered in bags — bags with straps over their backs or shoulders or around their waists, bags in their hands, bags on their arms and at their elbows — sewn bags, knit bags, woven bags, bags featuring feathers and seashells, wooden amulets, ceramic zodiacal symbols, and beads, beads, beads. Matt’s young instincts tell him that this world of mystic arts is funny and crazy and maybe a little dangerous. He feels an undertow of arousal every time he walks in.

Parker throws obstacles in Matt’s path every step of the way. The boy has his mother’s drug habit and fecklessness to contend with, a cop who wants to break him, bad guys of all stripes (including those masquerading as good guys), and vicious types all too willing to prey on a young, defenseless kid down on his luck. “No — and furthermore” thrives here.

Where A Thousand Steps falters is the characterization, often two-dimensional, as with Kyle’s allegedly superfluous self-sacrifice. I believe the portrayals of Matt’s mother and a cop — not the one who wants to take Matt down — and a few other “oldsters,” but not those of the kids. Matt’s about the most upstanding person in Laguna Beach, and though you want him to carry a certain moral weight, he’s too upright, respectful, and open. Given such a selfish, neglectful, dishonest parents, I don’t understand why he isn’t more like them, or at least struggling not to be. It’s as though, in this coming-of-age novel, the protagonist has already figured out this youth thing and gotten good at it.

Most obviously, he’s got no adolescent anger or rebelliousness, though he has more right to them than many people making noise in Laguna Beach. He’s also much too trusting, to the point that when his father (an over-the-top superpatriot) interrogates him about his sex life, he answers, without a qualm. No qualms, either, about opposing the Vietnam War, though Kyle’s in it; the narrative pays lip service to that moral complexity and zips onward. As for the two girls attracted to Matt, they’re types, with good looks and social and cultural markers, but little in the way of inner life.

Finally, the end disappointed me; after such careful plotting, I didn’t expect the hackneyed, predictable confrontations. The romance subplot also takes an odd twist, with little afterthought. Consequently, A Thousand Steps is a strange amalgam, a novel with an intensely strong physical presence yet flimsy characters, a highly inventive narrative that somehow loses its sure-handedness at the climax. Take that for what you will.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

An Indomitable Vietnamese Matriarch: The Mountains Sing

08 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: The Mountains Sing, by Nguyen Phan Qué Mai
Algonquin, 2020. 342 pp. $27

During the early 1970s, the waning years of American involvement in the Vietnam War, Tran Dieu Lan tells her granddaughter why their family lives now in Ha Noi, how they came to lose their prosperous farm, and about the several wars that have dispersed their family — they pray not permanently. It’s a mind-boggling story, full of senseless violence, courage, excruciating suffering, and an indomitable will not just to survive but to hope for better times. And even as Dieu Lan tells it, the Americans are still trying (in the inimitable phrase of General Curtis LeMay) to “bomb the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age,” while the Ha Noi government demands ever-increasing sacrifices and punishes defeatists.

The content of these stories provide the main reason to read The Mountains Sing. The Vietnam War, which I remember well from my teenage and young adult years, matters greatly to me, and I want to know more about “the other side.” To an extent, this novel fills that gap, so I recommend it despite its many flaws.

I don’t see a novel here, but a fictional memoir, if you will, based on the author’s family lore and anecdotes she collected. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s no unifying plot, just plot points, a bushel of them, about life under the French colonials, Japanese invaders during World War II, and the Ha Noi government, both in the 1950s and later. (Note an elision, the relative absence of Americans as aggressors, which I’ll get to in a minute.) It’s Vietnam’s painful history on display, and the occasional kindness or lenience provides a sharp contrast.

U.S. Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle’s March 1968 photo of the My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of civilians, prevented the army from hushing it up. Apparently, Haeberle had two cameras–one official, one personal–and this photo came from the latter (courtesy U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The most memorable episode concerns the so-called Land Reform of 1955, presumably intended to root out “exploitive capitalists,” a euphemism that excuses terror, whose aftermath reverberates in agonizing ways. Another gripping section portrays traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by which the north supplied its military effort in the south, and which I’ve seen in documentaries but never in fiction.

I also like the renderings of everyday life, ingenious, appalling, or both. You see the bicycle repairman who fixes flats using materials like toothpicks; you learn the types of roots, berries, and insects you have to forage when you’re on the run. I also like the many aphorisms that appear in dialogue, like, “One bite when starving equates one bundle when full,” or, “Perseverance grinds iron into needles.”

There’s a difference between story content and storytelling, though, and here’s where the novel falters. Qué Mai sets up plenty of emotional conflicts but has trouble deepening or staying with them. Sometimes her prose undermines her effort, as with transitions like this: “Those who killed him wanted to uproot and erase our family. I couldn’t let that happen.” Further, the Tran family and those who help them seem highly idealized. They all try to do the right thing; no grudge ever goes unreconciled; and despite a horrific war and limitless suffering, nobody holds onto hatred, especially not toward the most conspicuous perpetrators. Villains, meanwhile, are all bad.

However, the most curious way the author protects her characters involves the war itself. To no surprise, all the men are conscripted, but the narrative never shows them killing a single enemy soldier. One recruit witnesses an ambush of American GIs bathing, but he’s too sick with malaria to pull the trigger himself, and he feels only sympathy for the victims. Aside from the bombing raids; a parenthetical mention that American firepower killed three million Vietnamese; and a brief section about the defoliant Agent Orange, you’d barely know Americans ever fought in or injured Vietnam. South Vietnamese troops commit the only war crime presented as such.

This is the elision I referred to, which also seems to glide over the French colonial power before and after World War II. The Ha Noi government appears far worse than anyone else, but it’s rather strange to have characters openly prefer democracy over their own dictatorship, when the democratic government is the one dropping the bombs. If the narrative had dealt squarely with that contradiction, the novel might have had a chance to soar, but that grappling never happens. Instead, I’m left wondering whether the author wishes to whitewash her soldier characters from any killing they might have done; avoid offending American readers (whom I doubt would blame her for showing Vietnamese defending their country); or focus solely on the pity of war for all participants. Whatever the reason, soft-pedaling American evil while condemning all other kinds twists the narrative’s moral compass, when morality is the entire point.

Nevertheless, The Mountains Sing matters for its content, and if you’re at all curious about Vietnam, I suggest you read it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that splits its receipts with independent bookstores.

Family Snapshots: Summer of ’69

24 Monday Feb 2020

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Review: Summer of ’69, by Elin Hilderbrand
Little, Brown, 2019. 418 pp. $28

For Kate Foley Levin, the annual family pilgrimage in summer 1969 to her mother’s home in Nantucket will feel sparse and lonely. Her only son has been drafted and is an infantry grunt in Vietnam; any moment, she expects the telegram announcing his death. Kate responds by withdrawing to finds solace in the bottle. Meanwhile, her eldest, pregnant daughter can’t leave Boston to join the family, for her due date is weeks away, and she’s too uncomfortable to travel. Said daughter also suspects her geeky MIT husband, who consults for the Apollo space program, is cheating on her. The next eldest daughter, a contentious soul, has annoyed Kate by making a mess of college and getting arrested at protest marches. But she won’t be there to bother anyone, because she has a job on Martha’s Vineyard, where, unbeknownst to Mom, she falls for a Harvard man who happens to be black.

Jessie Levin, half-sister to these siblings (her father, David, is Kate’s second husband) needs her mother more than ever. Just turned thirteen, she feels utterly bereft without her family, especially her half-brother, to whom she’s very close. She’s also fighting several losing battles, most notably with her bigoted, vicious grandmother, Exalta, which Kate might have helped with, but forget that. One firefight concerns Jessie’s identification with her (purely cultural) Jewishness, a link she shares with her father; she’s freaked out that Exalta’s an anti-Semite.

So we’ve got the Vietnam War, to which the Levins and Foleys are opposed, and a son at risk. We have possible marital infidelity, alcoholism, political protest, interracial romance, and anti-Semitism. As if that weren’t enough, we have sexual and physical abuse, feminism, Jessie’s sexual awakening, and abortion. And oh, yes, Jessie’s reading The Diary of Anne Frank for school. Summer of ’69 purports to be beach reading, but that’s one hell of a load.

Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, July 21, 1969 (courtesy NASA, via Wikimedia Commons)

What we don’t have is the Sixties — the lingo, the vibe, the sense that this was an unusual decade, the belief that so much was possible yet so much was wrong, and that you felt compelled to take sides and make a statement. Hilderbrand shows none of that. She’s strong on fashion, issues, and headlines, but those are period details, museum exhibits. The summer of 1969 was my last before my senior year of high school, so we share a fascination for that moment (she was born that July). But, much as I enjoy re-creations of that time and salute her attempt, I don’t think she gets it.

In her favor, she can keep the pages turning. She’s a keen observer of family dynamics, and she manages to thread several narratives without missing a stitch. In her world, people don’t talk to each other, and the closer they are by blood, the less they say, because they have secrets to hide. She also has a friendly, drop-in-for-a-chat-dear-reader tone that makes her narrative pleasant company, like an easy-listening radio station.

But Hilderbrand’s ease cuts two ways. Despite the pain the characters suffer and the issues she raises, which couldn’t be more momentous, the treatment feels one-dimensional, like posed family snapshots. Everything seems too far away to hurt anybody for real. With so much simmering conflict and so little honesty, you’d think more would explode, and that’s why I finished the book. I wanted to know how Hilderbrand would resolve these conflicts—and I now know I wandered into Never-Never Land.

One problem’s the characterization. Kate’s controlling and craven by turns, and it’s not clear why. David’s a good guy with no depth, and the older sisters represent themes but lack compelling internal lives. Jesse’s the only character who seems reflective about what matters:

Jessie thought all grown-ups lived in a different atmosphere, one that was like a cool, clear gel. Adults had problems, Jessie knew — money and their children — but one of the benefits of reaching adulthood, she thought, was that you outgrew the raw, hot, chaotic emotions of adolescence.

Yet this girl, intelligent and emotionally tuned in, gets upset that Anne Frank dies; she thinks the book shouldn’t have ended like that. The Holocaust! Who knew? Hilderbrand warps her narrative up, down, and sideways to let her characters find redemption and forgiveness and throws in the world’s most famous Holocaust victim, as though Anne defined those values. But don’t get me started on writers who co-opt a Jewish girl as a Christian saint, a Joan of Arc who turned the other cheek–a travesty encouraged, in part, by Anne’s father, who sanitized his daughter’s diary for publication.

Let’s stay with Jessie, a perceptive, nominally Jewish child whose brother’s in the Viet Cong’s crosshairs. Her heart’s been broken, and she has a sense of painful reality, even if she doesn’t always understand the why or how. Maybe she unconsciously connects her brother’s fate with Anne’s. They’re both so good; how can they die?

That’s a worthy question, but Hilderbrand doesn’t stay there. Having shown how bad things can almost happen to good people, she bails them out by snapping her authorial fingers, relieving them of the hard work of living. Maybe that’s what a beach book is supposed to do, keep you at a distance from work. But in relying on that illusion of substance, Summer of ’69 trivializes its subject matter.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman
Putnam, 2018. 293 pp. $26

Dutiful, reliable, bewildered by life, unsure what happiness is or whether he’s ever experienced it, that’s Tom Hope — until he meets Hannah Babel. Hometown, Australia, has never seen anything like her, and even in 1968, the changes sweeping the West seem to have skipped this rural, agrarian corner of Down Under. Hannah, an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (a phrase probably seldom used, but it fits) plans to open a bookshop, of all things, and she hires Tom, a sheep rancher and orchardist, to do welding and carpentry to prepare for the opening. She’s utterly mercurial, older than he by fifteen years, speaks inflected English he can’t always fathom, and when she lets her canary, David, fly freely, the bird settles on Tom’s shoulder, further discomfiting him.

Hannah settles on him too, in a passionate rush that made me think, for a moment, that The Bookshop of the Brokenhearted derives from a male fantasy. But no; though their instant mutual attraction burns intensely, plenty of obstacles stand between them, least of which is that Tom has never read a book. A few years before, Tom married Trudy, a psychologically unstable woman who has left him, twice, and scarred him so badly that happiness is “a fugitive,” to “be roused to confidence, encouraged,” but, if grasped too strongly, might “slip back into the shadows, forever.” (Trudy’s legacy continues in other ways, but I don’t want to reveal too much.) Hannah has had two husbands, both dead, but she suffered her worst loss at Auschwitz, which stays with her, always. Metaphorically, that loss connects her to Trudy, something that neither Tom nor Hannah expected.

Poddy lambs, or orphans, drinking milk at a sheep station (ranch) in Australia (courtesy Figaro at English Wikipedia)

In lesser hands, a premise like this could easily turn sticky with treacle, melodrama, clichéd predictability, or a combination of these. Books, bookshops, and libraries are a hot thing in fiction these days, soon to be a trope, perhaps. Nevertheless, nothing happens here without second thoughts, reversals, mixed feelings, and a sense of dread, collectively the best tonic for treacle. Hillman never loses sight of his characters’ age, maturity, or makeup, and his narrative takes no adolescent flights of fancy, relying on simple prose, grounded in the everyday, again staying in character. Consider this passage early on, just after Trudy leaves, and Tom, in his workshop, wonders whether she’ll write:

With the soldering, it was the work of a good two hours. An old, demented ram he treated as a friend butted him repeatedly as he sanded and primed — not hard, just affectionately. And Beau [his dog] in turn chewed on the old ram’s leg. Tom asked himself aloud: ‘What do you expect her [Trudy] to say to you, you nong? “Hello, it’s a nice day?” For God’s sake.’ He was a practical person who never thought of fate and things that were meant to be. He could take apart an engine, stand surrounded by its thousand parts, find what was causing the problem, put the engine back together. He might daydream, but he knew that the dreams were foolish.

How can you resist a scene like that, which shows another side to a man not given to reflection?

Besides the treacle, it would be easy for a writer to adopt Hannah as a Jew of convenience, visible to a knowledgeable reader as unfamiliar with her own faith, which she’s also conveniently let slide. That’s a favorite device, as I’ve noted before in other posts. But Hillman knows his ground, rendering Hannah’s flashbacks with authority and depicting her Jewishness as well as the casual anti-Semitism of Tom’s neighbors. But their reaction is an aside; Tom has never heard of Auschwitz and has the barest notions of the Holocaust, about which Hannah refuses to tell him. So it’s the hidden past that lies between them, not what the neighbors say, about which Tom wouldn’t care anyway.

Names matter in this novel, at times too obviously. Tom Hope? Check. Does Babel refer to the tower of, given Hannah’s multilingual, sometimes chaotic persona; or Isaac, the great Russian writer murdered by Stalin? No question where Pastor Bligh comes from, a vicious, self-righteous disciplinarian who lives up to his namesake, except that he’s incompetent at his job. I have no sympathy for fundamentalist Christian cultist lunatic sadists, and I suppose that’s fair. Yet I want this man to have a three-dimensional rendering, and he doesn’t get one.

Even so, that’s the major glitch in The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, a warm, satisfying, decidedly unsticky novel, which I highly recommend.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Too Much, Yet Too Little: The Last Road Home

14 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Last Road Home, by Danny Johnson
Kensington, 2016. 324 pp. $15

As a young North Carolina boy in the late 1950s, Raeford Hurley loses his parents in a car accident. He goes to live with his grandparents, who farm tobacco in Chatham County, not far from Durham. They’re kind to him, and he loves them, but he misses his mother and their brief joyful moments:

We laughed, jumping around and making fools of ourselves, until we had to sit down on the floor. Her happiness would flow out like a circling wind and wrap me up, pulling me into her joy, letting me know it was okay to be alive and be silly. Daddy was the only one I ever saw who could make Momma’s eyes water. I think he would sometimes be mean to her on purpose just to show us life was serious and hard, and not to be wasted being childish. My momma was too gentle to die.

Right away, you understand what Raeford, known as Junebug, is looking for. And where he tries to find it, or, rather, with whom, makes for a gripping premise. Junebug’s only friends are two African-American twins, Lightning and Fancy Stroud, whose sharecropper parents work for white families. By the time they’re fifteen, in the early 1960s, Fancy and Junebug realize their attraction for one another. Despite the threat of exposure and violence in a community where the Ku Klux Klan holds sway, they have a passionate, all-consuming affair.

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s more, Fancy’s the sexual aggressor, making so many passes at Junebug that there’s no doubt she’s willed them to be together. Hasn’t she been raised to fear such impulses, especially where white boys are concerned? She says she has, yet her romance with Junebug feels inevitable. You know they’ll sleep together; you just don’t know exactly when.

Johnson writes as if Fancy and Junebug were like any two teenagers, who, given time and mutual attraction, will do what comes naturally. There’s naive charm in this, to be sure, but it’s also hard to believe. Surely, they’ve been taught that their relationship is anything but natural, so you’d expect them to struggle against that constraint and get to where they can embrace one another and damn the bigoted world. Instead, the process unfolds externally, based on facts rather than psychological depth–they’ve known each other since they were kids, they find warmth and laughter in each other, and their hormones are overflowing.

Consequently, The Last Road Home feels too self-conscious by half, and the failure to evoke time or place suggests a rootlessness, much as with the orphaned Junebug himself. Johnson excels at interiors; you see the tobacco farm, the chores, the general store in town, and so forth. But you don’t see the town itself, the red dirt by the roadside, or the Confederate flags on the license plates; you don’t smell the tobacco curing when you drive the highway; and the 1960s never emerge, at least not to suggest that the characters live and breathe in their milieu. Even civil-rights protests rate barely a mention, and then only so that a character can predict that the racial landscape will surely change one day.

Rather, Fancy and Junebug exist in a private vacuum. They have no other friends to provide a context or influence their outlook, and Johnson has kept their families small–and, except for Junebug’s grandmother–mostly out of sight. This may seem convenient, because there’s nobody around to upset the grand design, but that’s precisely the difficulty. Rather than explore the interracial love to which other people object, Johnson stuffs the plot with extraneous obstacles, as if blind hatred and the risk of lynching weren’t enough trouble. Without giving anything more away, I’ll paraphrase the jacket flap (too revealing, as is typical). Junebug gets involved in a business deal that goes wrong, leaving him “with a dark secret” he can’t tell anyone. Later, he goes to war, and though the flap doesn’t say where, you know it must be Vietnam.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting just to separate star-crossed lovers. Johnson could have accomplished the same thing had he not restrained the town bigots, who take their time to react and pull their punches when they do. As a result, though The Last Road Home sometimes hits its stride (the Vietnam combat sequences are especially vivid), the novel seems like an explanation rather than a story, a collection rather than a synthesis.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Vietnam, Up Close: The Man from Saigon

03 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Man from Saigon, by Marti Leimbach
Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2009. 342 pp. $26

Have you ever read a first-rate novel that still leaves you unsatisfied? For me, The Man from Saigon is one, because, good as it is, it should be ten times better. The subject is riveting, the writing sublime, and the plot couldn’t have more tension. Yet though I believe everything that happens to the characters, I don’t believe what happens between them.

You can’t argue with the premise, though, or with how Leimbach carries it out. It’s 1967, and Susan Gifford, who writes for a women’s magazine, goes to Vietnam to cover the war. The story follows her fumbling efforts to understand Saigon, where everything and everyone is for sale; the climate seems too crushing to withstand; and the American officers conducting press briefings treat her with even more contempt than they do her male colleagues. Susan quickly realizes that to file anything worthwhile, she must get up-country, which she does, with the help of Marc, a TV reporter, and Son, a Vietnamese photographer whom no one else trusts.

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

Leimbach renders these events so vividly that it’s as if you too were getting spat on by the teenage prostitutes on Tu Do Street, huddling in a bunker under bombardment firmly convinced that the next incoming shell will kill you, or watching an army surgeon coked on Dexadrine performing operations round the clock.

And then the story really kicks into gear. Susan and Son join a supply mission heading into the Mekong Delta, supposedly nothing dangerous. But the Viet Cong ambush the column, capture the two journalists, and set out to find their own unit, from which they too have become separated. They take Susan’s boots, spare clothes, and personal possessions, and though she tries, through Son, to explain that she’s not a spy, a soldier, or a threat, they can’t understand what she’s doing there or why. So beyond the cuts on her feet, which become infected, or feeling dizzy and faint from lack of food and water, she fears every second for her life and Son’s.

Leave a box of vegetables in the sun and that is the smell. Lie on asphalt at noon on an August day and that is the temperature. The heat rises from the ground, bombards you from above. The dense brush, the banyan trees, their branches intertwined, connect at the top to form a canopy, allowing no breeze. . . . She has been on such marches before, always with a company of Americans, always with Son who carried the bulk of the equipment. It is different now. A kind of timelessness has set in. She keeps thinking she is dying, that she is walking with a ghost.

I’ve read many eyewitness accounts of the Vietnam War, the centerpiece of my teenage years, but I’ve never read anything as visceral as The Man from Saigon. The pigheaded nature of American policy, the duplicity, the savagery on both sides, the corruption at every level, the misery and death–they’re all here, in beautifully rendered detail.

That said, however, for me, The Man from Saigon fails as anything other than a sort of journalistic fiction. Marc, the TV reporter, becomes Susan’s lover mostly because they share that terrifying bunker under fire. I’d believe that they might sleep together a few times, but not that Susan loves him, as she repeatedly claims. Their only common bond is a passion to know what the army refuses to let them see, and what lies they’re told instead, but otherwise, he’s a closed door. He says little or nothing about his life, feelings, dreams, or past–except that he’s married–and tries to drown his anxieties in drugs and alcohol. He’s got nothing to give her.

Then there’s Son, for whom her affection grows during their captivity, during which he treats her as kindly as he can, even tenderly, at moments. I think we’re meant to compare him to Marc. But Susan doesn’t know who Son really is, so can you call that love? Also, she suspects he’s working for Hanoi, yet somehow, that doesn’t matter; she never considers that his activities might cause many deaths, including those of her countrymen. About Vietnam, I’m as dovish as they come, yet I don’t see how you can duck that moral question; in war, no matter what you do, there are always consequences. And if Leimbach is trying to send a feminist message, that Son’s quiet tenderness beats Marc’s overt masculinity any day, I agree, but not because of what she writes. The narrative allows neither man much of an inner life, so the contrast feels superficial and set up–Son has a gentle character, whereas Marc has a job and an outlook. No contest, there.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Everybody’s Guilty: The Sympathizer

25 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove/Atlantic, 2015. 371 pp. $26

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the narrator known only as the Captain declares in this novel’s first line, also the start of his “confession.” And what a harrowing, painful outpouring he commits to paper in what appears to be solitary confinement, inflicted by captors at first unidentified. He tells of being born illegitimate in North Vietnam, of half-European parentage, and the vicious prejudice that pursues him as a result. His only consolations are the unwavering love of a mother who died young, and two longtime friends whose loyalty sustains him and for whom he would lay down his life. He talks about his education in the United States, and his attraction for aspects of American culture, not least its freer sexual mores. But mostly, he recounts what he did–or failed to do–as a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, a riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale of crimes he committed to protect his secret identity, trying desperately to play both sides. Accordingly, he knows more than he cares to about murder, rape, treachery, napalm, torture, racism, and hypocrisy, and he delivers much of his story with brilliant observations that are often howlingly funny in a raw, dark way.

Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975. As Saigon fell, some Vietnamese civilians were evacuated to U.S. Navy vessels, as here, and granted asylum (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via U.S. Marines; public domain)

Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975. As Saigon fell, some Vietnamese civilians were evacuated to U.S. Navy vessels, as here, and granted asylum (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via U.S. Marines; public domain).

“What was it like,” he asks rhetorically, “to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?” Much as he admires American culture, he deflates our “Disneyland ideology of happiness,” our pretense of eternal innocence no matter how many times we’ve lost it in dirty wars or tricks, “citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.” And when you pretend innocence, you can believe that anything you do is just, whereas, “at least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”

Not that the South Vietnamese government is any better. The General, under whom the Captain serves, is a gifted, patriotic leader who pays lip service to moral assumptions only so long as they prop up his power and self-image. He’s seen everything, learned nothing. Ditto the Communists, who think life is a science determined by historical axioms, and who have no use for love, except for the teachings of Marx and Mao, which the Captain has hardly studied–they’ve no feeling to them. “How could I forget,” he remarks toward the end, “that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were the empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?” Most particularly, he deplores the cold sexlessness to which communism aspires, “the belief that every comrade is supposed to behave like a noble peasant whose hard hoe is devoted only to farming.”

Consequently, the Captain belongs nowhere, and it’s his ability to see everything from the outside–his sole talent, he thinks–that only worsens his sense of isolation. But it does make for terrific satire. He meets a right-wing congressman, a filmmaker, a professor of Asian studies, and skewers them all, without ever claiming to be superior. The Captain’s flaws are front and center, in fact, to the point that the sympathizer can be hard to sympathize with.

This novel is very disturbing, and some readers may shy away because of it. In particular, the graphic violence can be hard to take. But if you can, give it a try. Such grisliness often puts me off, but the subject here matters to me. I came of age during the Vietnam War, which left a deep impression, and about which I’ve read many fine books. To me, this one surpasses them all–for its unsparing honesty, insight, breadth, and vivid prose. What’s more, it’s even a first novel, further proof to a fellow author that life just isn’t fair.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Dead Returned from Vietnam: Cementville

23 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: Cementville, by Paulette Livers

Counterpoint, 2014. 275 pp. $25

In May 1969, an American artillery platoon near Phu Bai suffered heavy losses during a night attack by North Vietnamese infantry. Since the platoon originated from a Kentucky National Guard unit, many of the dead hailed from the same county, which threw a community into deep mourning.

The firebase near Phu Bai, overrun in May 1969 (Courtesy Kentucky National Guard).

The firebase near Phu Bai, overrun in May 1969 (Courtesy Kentucky National Guard).

Paulette Livers, a native Kentuckian, has turned this collective grief into a novel, Cementville, named for the fictional county seat that lays to rest seven of its sons. Livers casts her net widely, trying to re-create an entire town, many of whose members are related by blood or marriage, and how they grieve the losses (or don’t). Each has an intersecting story, which gives the novel a mosaic feel. There’s thirteen-year-old Maureen, determined to live an important life, while her mother, Katherine, does her best to keep the apron strings tied, the relationship that interested me the most. But Cementville also has a Vietnamese war bride; a murderous clan, the Fergusons, who live in trailers; Nimrod Grebe, an elderly black man who fought in World War I; a woman who invents reasons not to leave her house, except to visit the library; and many others.

What an ambitious scheme. I applaud the attempt to depict a world split in pieces by love, hate, heroism, patriotism, bitterness, and grief. That’s like reaching for the stars, and not enough novelists do that today. Also, as someone who remembers 1969 very well, I’m always looking for a full-fledged, honest rendition of that time. The jacket flap promises a “microcosm of a society shedding the old order and learning how to live with grief,” so I grabbed Cementville off the library shelf. Further, Livers writes well, beautifully, at times.

But Cementville, though a valiant attempt, remains mostly earthbound for me. For one thing, it’s more a collection of stories than a novel, unlinked by any common thread, except a murder that seems gratuitous, even trivial, next to everything else. Significant characters behave strangely, for no apparent reason, and some of the better-drawn figures, like Katherine and Maureen, need deeper inner lives.

Then too, the town isn’t a microcosm of anything; it’s a pastiche. The narrative mentions that Katherine’s reading The Feminine Mystique, and also refers to possible resentment in the town that a young girl from the Ferguson trailer clan keeps house for Nimrod Grebe, the elderly African-American. But that’s the extent of feminism and race relations here.

I can’t blame Livers for not living up to the hype–authors don’t necessarily write their own flap copy–but I wish she’d provided a true sense of time and place. It takes more than passing references to Led Zeppelin or fish-net stockings to portray an era that feels lived in. Nobody in this novel debates or feels strongly about signs of change, whether campus protests, the moon landing, hallucinogenic drugs, hemlines, haircuts, or any other aspect of that noisy era. Even more astonishingly, nobody discusses the war that has caused such pain, nor do the young men who lost their lives appear as anything but faceless ghosts.

This is a crucial weakness, I think, reflected in how there seems to be only one resident supporter of the war among many critics of it. That rings false, both to the fictional world and what actually happened. In fact, Livers could have used differing opinions about the war, and whether the local boys died in vain, as a driving (and dividing) force. Consequently, it’s not just outside events that fail to echo in Cementville; it’s the disaster in Cementville that fails to shake the place deeply enough.

Dislcaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.