Girl By The Road At Night: A Novel of Vietnam (2010)
David Rabe (1940-)
230 pages
She’s a complete f**king mystery, like the weather in some far-off part of the world changing the weather where he is. Like the planets and their shifting in a horoscope, and you read it in the newspaper and say, “What the f**k?” (p. 194)
Pfc Joe Whitaker, having drifted through life with little in the way of a plan, his aimlessness leading to frustration that can quickly turn into anger, finds himself a few days away from the hard certainty of deployment to Vietnam, as David Rabe’s new novel Girl By the Road At Night opens. Half-a-world away, Quach Ngoc Lan earns money for herself and her family as a prostitute at a small roadside business area in South Vietnam, trying to make sense of her separation from her family and the traditions she grew up with, and looking for some consoling connection to another person, even as she tries to remain disengaged from the physical and emotional traumas that come with her work. When their paths finally cross, each becomes dimly aware of having found a kindred soul in the turmoil of the war that surrounds them. But mystifying cultural differences and the written and unwritten rules of the soldiers on both sides make the relationship that develops between them a struggle at every step.
Along the way, David Rabe, a Vietnam Veteran himself, provides stark images of the chaotic situation the American soldiers stepped into in Vietnam. They are able to mix freely with the civilians in the towns and cities around their bases, but certain areas remain off-limits to them, dangerous for no clear reason; they find the civilians and South Vietnamese army dependent on them, but distrustful and fearful at the same time; they walk nightly patrols guarding a camp carved out of the jungle, not allowed to arm their weapons, and not sure who might be waiting in the dark on the other side of the fence as they pass by. And, what for me drove home the disconcerting nature of the war, the cognitive dissonance it must have caused, was the description of Whitaker’s meals at several points in the mess hall; for example, “He downs two cheeseburgers with tons of catsup and piles of fired potatoes, piles of pickles, some orange juice, and several cups of coffee” (p. 209). It is as if Whitaker has been able to pass from the jungles of South East Asia, into a diner on any street in the US, before passing a short time later back into the chaos outside. It somehow brings home too, more clearly than a description of all the equipment of war, the monumental undertaking of moving essentially a community, its people and material and structure, up out of one country and dropping it into another.
Rabe also brings references to Vietnamese cultural and literary traditions into the novel, making the story more than that of simply an American soldier in Vietnam. As Lan tries to make sense of her place in a Vietnam turned upside down by war, and her troubled relationship with Whitaker, she considers them in the light of the traditions she has grown up with, and the stories she knows from her youth. For an American reader, this can be a fascinating part of Rabe’s novel --- the reason for reading, really, to learn about some other people and their history.
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