Two Vietnam Novels

A few weeks ago two novels about Vietnam were reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Danielle Trussoni. Somewhat reluctantly, I put both of them on my library order list. Trussoni is not my favorite novelist and lately I've grown suspicious of rave reviews. Who is scratching whose back, I always wonder. But now that I've read both books I'm eating a large dish of humble crow and telling others about them.
The first to arrive was The Lotus Eaters, a first novel by Tatjana Solis. For those of you who might have forgotten, in the Odyssey Odysseus reports that some of his fellow battle-weary Greek veterans were lured into eating the "honey-sweet fruit of the lotos," which made them forgetful of the "homeward way." Tennyson picked up the episode in his poem "The Lotos-Eaters," to imagine Odysseus/Ulysses bemoaning his fellow mariners' longing to languish on the Lotos-eaters' island rather than "labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar" to the point even of death.
Solis's lotus eaters are American journalists in Vietnam, drugged on the opiate of war and not eager to go home. Helen, a 32-year-old photographer who has abandoned her safe life at home for the chance to depict the war in which her brother has died, finds herself in an affair with Darrow, a prize-winning photographer with a complicated marital situation. He is killed, and later in the book there is a marvelous scene in which Helen takes a few of his possessions to his widow--it's not at all what one expects, and is all the better for it. Somewhere in the middle of all this, she falls in love with Linh, his Vietnamese assistant with a complicated past that includes some involvement with the other side and a dead wife and child. It's a good choice though, as he is by far the superior human being, wise beyond his years and deeply in love with her. What is unlikely about their relationship becomes totally believable in Solis's capable hands. Linh is a great character.
What stands out in this novel is the degree to which it conveys the hallucinatory, morally ambivalent, seductive atmosphere of wartime Vietnam--one can almost smell the place and feel the weight of the air. The notion that war is a drug that that turns its participants into addicts is not a new idea but this novel really shows how it happens, especially in the character of Helen, who knows better but shoots up anyway. Her semi-abandonment of Linh, partially selfish, partially not, exemplifies the contradictions in her character. But worry not, the novel has a satisfying ending, one that redeems her without simplifying. All in all, it's a great read.
Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, also a first novel, is very different. Focused on Bravo Company, a rifle platoon of 40 Marines led by second lieutenant Waino Mellas, it is about war, plain and simple, and a complicated war that the US lost at that. Marlantes served as a Marine and it shows; I'm not sure I've ever read any account of war that convinced me it was the real thing as this one does.
Matterhorn is the name given to a hill between Laos and the DMZ where Mellas's company is ordered to build a fire-support base, only the first of almost impossible tasks they are meant to carry out--it will only get worse. There were moments when I wondered to myself if I really wanted to know so much about leeches, jungle rot, fever, rotting corpses, immersion foot, etc., but what kept me reading was the human factor, beginning with the appealing Mellas, a reservist with a Princeton degree and an understandable lack of self-confidence in the face of the impossible tasks asked of him by the unsympathetic brass who give them their orders.
The Marines of Bravo Company are a polyglot lot with some big racial problems that frequently turn violent, only complicating an already complicated situation.
Mellas growing understanding of the tragedy, the futility, the uselessness, the horror of the war is the crux of the book and Marlantes is very good at tracing this process, always in human terms. In this sense, it's a heartbreaking book with a universal impact. In one sense, The Lotus-Eaters, fine as it is, is a narrower novel. Yes, addiction to war, or war porno, as it has been called, is universal, but not to the extent that the human experience of battle is. In this respect, Matterhorn brought to mind Caroline Alexander's wonderful The War That Killed Achilles, a reading of the Iliad with an emphasis on its implications for our understanding of the boundless human cost of war.
In short, Marlantes has written what seems to me a major novel, one that goes well beyond the Vietnam War. And it does have, fortunately, an excellent glossary for those of us less familiar with the terminology of the conflict.