Fiction, General

Us: A Novel

Name: Us: A Novel
Author: Wayne Karlin
ISBN: 9780805010831

by Wayne Karlin

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Overview

The legacy of the American experience in Vietnam is still unfolding, a matrix of barbed and irreconcilable issues and attitudes that we will carry, in spite of ourselves, into the next century. We are all haunted, no matter where we stood or what we did during those years, by the unappeasable ghosts of American conscience and commitment gone horribly wrong, and by the ambiguous fate of the thousands of Americans left behind - still missing in action, still unaccounted for - the ghostly ranks of the MIAs. In Us, his fourth novel, Wayne Karlin explores our national obsession with our MIAs in a drama that combines aspects of realistic adventure narrative with a more emblematic quest - sometimes hallucinatory, sometimes hilarious - for the deeper psychological significance these missing men and women hold in the American psyche. Loman, Karlin's protagonist, is a Vietnam vet with a checkered career. He has chosen to remain in Southeast Asia, and owns a bar in Bangkok, mecca for sex tours and cheap drugs, and port of entry for all those who come in search of the "missing." When a visiting congressman engages him to help establish contact with a group of MIAs the congressman alleges is operating as an independent force with one of the Golden Triangle opium armies, Loman accepts the job, not realizing at first that his search will quickly bring him up against a mind and force with which he is utterly unfamiliar. History, myth, and reality blur as Karlin then enters a world that turns our expectations upside down, a world of mountain spirits, montebanks, and strange rebels. By book's end, Loman has learned again some of the harshest lessons of the war, but also has achieved a measure of peace that had previously escaped him. Tim O'Brien has written that Wayne Karlin is "one of the most gifted writers to emerge from the Vietnam War." In Us, his best book to date, Karlin probes as deeply into the dark heart of the war and its aftermath as any writer of his generation.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Like the movie Apocalypse Now , this novel mixes cynical realism with hallucinatory myth as it measures the psychic wounds inflicted by the Vietnam War. The narrative portions follow Loman, an expatriate American vet who owns a bar/brothel in Bangkok, as he plays reluctant guide to Congressman Elliott Mundy in his quest for photo-op gold: living proof of MIAs surviving in the Burmese jungle. Karlin's expert recreation of snipered paranoia yields for long stretches to studied stream-of-consciousness as Loman grapples with a spiritual realm at least as nasty as the opium war in whose midst he has landed. The sad protagonist proves ultimately less interesting than his battle-scarred supporting cast: the bar's circle of crazy vets, pampered politico Mundy and a ruthless ex-CIA operative. Karlin ( Crossfire ) handles a now-familiar tale of U.S. complicity in Third-World carnage with earnest professionalism, but his epic exercise seems a bit forced, its horror a tool for pedantry, its moral as predictable as any medieval passion play. ( Feb. )

Library Journal

Loman, a cynical U.S. veteran and owner of a Bangkok sex bar, survives as part of the post-Vietnam detritus of Indochina. He is caught in a cabalistic web of intrigue when pressured to guide a Congressman into the jungle in search of MIAs rumored to be aligned with rebel opium forces of the Burma/Laos/Thailand Golden Triangle. Once he is there, all hell breaks loose amid betrayal, the carnage of ambush, and the inverted world of impenetrable myth. Evocative descriptions of Eastern culture couple with graphic, unsparing depictions of brutal violence and sexual depravity. A convoluted plot, army jargon, and foreign idioms create dense reading for the average person. Explicit violence effectively conveys the horror and dehumanization of war but makes tough reading for anyone. By the author of other military novels, this is recommended for Vietnam and war fiction collections; otherwise, an optional purchase.-- Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.