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Girl by the Road at Night A Novel of Vietnam David Rabe 9781439163337 Books

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Girl by the Road at Night A Novel of Vietnam David Rabe 9781439163337 Books

All muddy: a dreary tale told by a sodden dog of war. That's how I felt when I reached the end of this novel.


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Girl by the Road at Night A Novel of Vietnam David Rabe 9781439163337 Books Reviews

Although I've long appreciated David Rabe's writings, I hadn't planned to read Girl by the Road at Night immediately after I bought it. However, when I went to bed and put it on my night table, I then thought "What the hell . . . ?" and began reading. Despite the late hour I read almost all that night, until sleep beat me. The next morning I quickly finished what is an extraordinary achievement sort of a Great Gatsby of our time -- a short novel encapsulating some of the primary conditions governing life. For within the characters of Joe Whitaker and Quach Ngoc Lan exist the confusions we find in ourselves and through them the wariness we have toward others. Moreover, much of this confusion and wariness results from a human's need for love, friendship, the need for the Other other than ourselves. Girl by the Road at Night takes place in Vietnam during that war but is not a Vietnam War novel, per se. War, to be sure, is in the background, but it is the relationship of Lan and Whittaker that makes this novel special, a relationship that ultimately suggests sex is paradise but love is hell.

The first half of the Girl by the Road at Night concentrates and develops Whitaker's character, which is important for making the Lan / Whitaker relationship work. Lan, a prostitute, and Whitaker, a soldier, establish a good storyline as old as prostitution, as old as time. But great writing is created by the good story and its details, and here Rabe has beaten the Devil. One example is the moment when Whittaker, hauling sandbags, feels the sand bag pulling at his skin as he lowers it to the ground, a mundane detail, true, but one substantiating not only that moment but the novel's more exquiste details such as
"He does not know how she woke in the night to eat an orange and stare at him and think of the legendary Old Man of the Moon who sits in moonlight reading his book in which are recorded the connections that will come between people in the world. Quick and silent as a spider, he puts a web of invisible, rosy threads throughout the world until all people everywhere who are destined to be pairs are linked in a secret, lovely manner. Down through their lives the threads draw the lovers, down the trails and rivers, from city to forest, until they finally meet and love. Holding in her palm a wedge of orange she didn't eat, Lan felt her threads running to the air. The wind had them No old man anywhere knew of her. Whittaker leaps aboard the Lambretta. He is debris, he knows, a leaf that arrived here on a wind and now, thank god, the gusts that brought him have known enough to return. In the comforting free rhythm of their wings, he rides away."

Such poetry provides relief from the ugliness of the life Lan and Whittaker find about them as their relationship permits a momentary escape to paradise. Inexorably, however, little lasting relief is in this world of ironies. For Whittaker, "a woman is a sometime thing"; for Lan a man can be the dream upon which a life may be built. These contrary threads thus construct only an incidental relationship whose whole, however, leads to tragedy - and an electrifying conclusion as honest as any novel's ending in our literature. Rabe has created a masterwork.
I probably won't buy another David Rabe book.
I found the writing style artificial and alienating. The effect of that style is to make the main characters, Whittaker and Lan, even less engaging than they are. The plot is too slender to support the story. By the time I finished the book I felt, "Okay, so what?"
"Girl by the Road at Night" was written by David Rabe. Mr. Rabe was born in Dubuque Iowa in 1940. Rabe earned an MA from Villanova University after being drafted into service in Vietnam in 1965. David Rabe is best known as an American playwright having won a Tony award for "Sticks and Bones" in 1972. He is the author of several novels. "Girl by the Road at Night" is his first work of fiction set in Vietnam.

This story is told by an anonymous narrator. Dialog is attributed to the person speaking. The prose is noticeably inelegant comprised of short terse sentences. The dialog of the Vietnamese is spoken in "pidgin English "style. A great deal of vulgar language permeates the narrative.

The story line involves the events surrounding a young soldier, Pvt. Joseph Whitaker and a Vietnamese prostitute, Quach Ngoc Lan known as Lan, during Whitakers service in the Vietnam war. The story opens with Whitaker spending his last free days in Washington DC at a peace rally while awaiting deployment to Vietnam. From there, the story takes up with Whitaker's chance meeting of Lan while he is attached to a medical outpost in Vietnam and the untoward attraction that they have for each other.

This novel seems to fail on three levels. In the first, the prose is terse with uninspiring metaphorical musings and some silly dialog such as this exchange "What do cars say to one another? He thinks. They putt and sputter. What in the person is the spark? The use of "pidgin English" in conversation with Lan may work well in a play, but it was particularly vexing as conversation in this novel. It came across as silly and intellectually vacuous. In the second, the story line is no more than copious amounts of copulation. Whitaker can't seem to function a whole day without thinking about or having sexual relations and Lan's life as a prostitute seems only filled with that mission. Thirdly, the characters are zombie like. Whitaker, though twenty years old, is stuck mentally as a sixteen year old adolescent who only just discovered his sexuality. Lan is undecipherable, and shows no seeming purpose to her life except to entertain another customer. There is absolutely nothing interesting or endearing about any of these characters.

All and all, I thoroughly disliked this novel and perceive that most readers will too.
I therefore do not recommend it and rate it "Forgettable".
All muddy a dreary tale told by a sodden dog of war. That's how I felt when I reached the end of this novel.