Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam
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Price: $15.64
You Save: $7.36 (32%)
I can't stop thinking about this book, an unforgettable story about a strange but believable and heartbreaking relationship between a simple American soldier, Private Joe Whitaker, and a simple Vietnamese prostitute named Quach Ngoc Lan.
Rabe takes these two almost clichéd figures of war fiction and, through brilliant writing and sharp observation, turns them into quirky, unique individuals with poignant histories and complex inner lives. The prose is vivid and sensuous, the images stark, horrifying, surreal, and tender. And the ending possesses a sense of ironic tragedy and inevitability as powerful as Edith Wharton's conclusion of "Ethan Frome." And yet this novel is also funny in places, and the powerful language and plot pull you from page to page. Totally compelling.
Though the story takes place in Vietnam during the early days of the war, there are no battles and certainly no heroics. In fact, I don't think you could really call this a "war novel." More accurately, it's about how small misunderstandings and unnoticed mistakes escalate into disaster. But then, that sounds like a lot of wars, doesn't it, and like a lot of relationships that don't work out for all kinds of reasons. And even though the relationship between Whitaker and Lan is erotic and complex, the word "love," in its familiar sense, is not in their vocabularies.
Yet I cannot stop thinking about the two of them -- Lan and Whitaker -- thrown together from opposite sides of the earth -- sex and war like fate drawing them to one another under the most barren conditions. Despite the harshness of their relationship and their reluctance to care for each other, they slowly discover something that could, in their separateness, almost pass for love -- a meaningful, surprisingly gentle shared identity that neither seemed capable of before. Paradoxically, however, that identity is both real and illusory.
Nothing in this novel is sentimental or melodramatic. It is "told slant," as Emily Dickinson would say, though it seems odd to quote her in this context. Yet now that I've done it, it also seems right, for there is real poetry in this great book, and in the end, the truth comes as a "superb surprise" -- one that is dark and troubling. In Dickinson's words, it "dazzles gradually." And it does, indeed, tell "all the truth," It is quite unforgettable.
Moon-Crossed Lovers?
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.
Like two ships passing in the night, except they have sex as they pass.
Two of the oldest and maybe most common activities or "professions" are here, war and prostitution. As old and as ever present war has been in society, so has paying for sex or at least getting by force. Are both evil? Or are they necessities? While the book doesn't necessarily provide answers, those are some questions that remain with me after reading this book. Both have victims, there is money/resources and the need for it, and there is an imbalance of power and (mis)use of that power.
Rabe creates some thoughtful refined prose which fits particularly well and is enjoyable to read. I have never read Rabe before or watched his plays. I was drawn to the book by the topic and the supposed origin of the story as it relates to "The Tale of Kieu." Admittedly, I didn't like the first half of the book, at least with the American soldier, but that is me. He was too sex crazed and neutral about going to Vietnam. While I am OK with the non-political take, he didn't seem too interesting pre-Vietnam. The focus was his search for sex with whomever is available, such as borrowing someone's girlfriend or from an ex who was married. The portrayal of the Vietnamese prostitute is somewhat authentic, particularly with the subject of duty and abuse. Let's face it, it is not too hard to find a tragic character in Vietnam especially with women and children. In Vietnam and in a time of war, there is nothing glamorous or romantic about being a prostitute, and Rabe doesn't make it so.
A particular complaint I have is given the limited contact and fleeting interaction between the two, it is a stretch for the girl to put such emotional hope in the American. Maybe she didn't but the reader likely will think or hope so. Which leads to my ***Warning sociopolitical opinion forthcoming*** problem with the whole theme of a white knight saving the girl or the damaged girl that needs saving gets a little old as with movies (Pretty Woman etc), theatre (Miss Saigon) and even Disney (see Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, etc). The book stops just short of that, barely, but I would have enjoyed reading Rabe without the possible theme or back drop of an American rescuing a woman of color prostitute. And it is not that, really, but close, if that makes any sense. I give it 3.5 stars, almost 4 because the writing is very good and I like the length, but definitely not a 3 which I consider just average.
Shattering novel of poetic prose.
Previously published at: [...]
I was terrified! From somewhere deep inside, there was a presence, a deep-rooted sense that my ultimate fate would be to die in a rice paddy -- if I went to Viet Nam. My family and my community had instilled an equally deep sense of patriotism in my psyche. My father was a World War II survivor. My sister's father died in the Philippine Islands in the same war. My size and lack of street smarts left me out of the "survivor" category and more towards the "victim" role. My birthday came up at number 65 in the December draft lottery of 1969 and when I started college in the summer of 1970, I was classified 2-S, student. Those factors gave me significant incentive to study, not to mention the mental images reported by television and LIFE magazine. The photograph that was later known as "Reaching Out" made me nauseous; I couldn't look at it for years. It's still a disturbing image.
Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe begins with Joe Whitaker's visit to the Washington Memorial amidst anti-war demonstrations on the mall. He had difficulty maintaining his focus and experienced no enjoyment from his last stint as a tourist because of the piece of paper in his pocket. It was a neatly folded copy of his order to go to the war. "Fingering the shape of the papers outlining his fate beneath the cloth of his jacket, he is bewildered by the power of the document," and then, "How can paper move him? Incredibly, his hand is shaking." For me, it's 1969 again, and I feel his terror. Can I deal with the fear forty years later? I can't put the book down.
Another story line develops as we meet Quach Ngoc Lan who is Vietnamese. What could a girl who stands by the road at night in 1969 be other than a prostitute? These two characters are destined to meet. When and for how long will the two stories merge -- and will they diverge?
We come to know each character by hearing their thoughts and observing their actions as Rabe puts us in the story with poetic prose that creates vivid mental images using brief interactions and short but meaningful conversations. We don't need all the details. We are there. We know what happens next. We know how the story ends. We keep reading to experience the emotions of the characters and learn something of ourselves. A third party character has learned and taught her children that manners require that a decent person conceal news of misfortune whenever possible. Her manners disquiet the reader.
The story challenges my conscience. Could something like this happen to me today? How would I react? Are my morals intact and do I have the strength to act out my spoken convictions? In my heart, I want to be reassured, to have my mind put at ease, even if what is kept from me is very bad.
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Price: $15.64
You Save: $7.36 (32%)
Product Details
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Description
David Rabe’s award-winning Vietnam plays have come to embody our collective fears, doubts, and tenuous grasp of a war that continues to haunt. Partially written upon his return from the war, Girl by the Road at Night is Rabe’s first work of fiction set in Vietnam—a spare and poetic narrative about a young soldier embarking on a tour of duty and the Vietnamese prostitute he meets in country.Private Joseph Whitaker, with Vietnam deployment papers in hand, spends his last free weekend in Washington, DC, drinking, attending a peace rally, and visiting an old girlfriend, now married. He observes his surroundings closely, attempting to find reason in an atmosphere of hysteria and protest, heightened by his own anger. When he arrives in Vietnam, he happens upon Lan, a local girl who submits nightly to the American GIs with a heartbreaking combination of decency and guile. Her family dispersed and her father dead, she longs for a time when life meant riding in water buffalo carts through rice fields with her brother. Whitaker’s chance encounter with Lan sparks an unexpected, almost unrecognized, visceral longing between two people searching for companionship and tenderness amid the chaos around them.In transformative prose, Rabe has created an atmosphere charged with exquisite poignancy and recreated the surreal netherworld of Vietnam in wartime with unforgettable urgency and grace. Girl by the Road at Night is a brilliant meditation on disillusionment, sexuality, and masculinity, and one of Rabe’s finest works to date.Customer Reviews
UnforgettableI can't stop thinking about this book, an unforgettable story about a strange but believable and heartbreaking relationship between a simple American soldier, Private Joe Whitaker, and a simple Vietnamese prostitute named Quach Ngoc Lan.
Rabe takes these two almost clichéd figures of war fiction and, through brilliant writing and sharp observation, turns them into quirky, unique individuals with poignant histories and complex inner lives. The prose is vivid and sensuous, the images stark, horrifying, surreal, and tender. And the ending possesses a sense of ironic tragedy and inevitability as powerful as Edith Wharton's conclusion of "Ethan Frome." And yet this novel is also funny in places, and the powerful language and plot pull you from page to page. Totally compelling.
Though the story takes place in Vietnam during the early days of the war, there are no battles and certainly no heroics. In fact, I don't think you could really call this a "war novel." More accurately, it's about how small misunderstandings and unnoticed mistakes escalate into disaster. But then, that sounds like a lot of wars, doesn't it, and like a lot of relationships that don't work out for all kinds of reasons. And even though the relationship between Whitaker and Lan is erotic and complex, the word "love," in its familiar sense, is not in their vocabularies.
Yet I cannot stop thinking about the two of them -- Lan and Whitaker -- thrown together from opposite sides of the earth -- sex and war like fate drawing them to one another under the most barren conditions. Despite the harshness of their relationship and their reluctance to care for each other, they slowly discover something that could, in their separateness, almost pass for love -- a meaningful, surprisingly gentle shared identity that neither seemed capable of before. Paradoxically, however, that identity is both real and illusory.
Nothing in this novel is sentimental or melodramatic. It is "told slant," as Emily Dickinson would say, though it seems odd to quote her in this context. Yet now that I've done it, it also seems right, for there is real poetry in this great book, and in the end, the truth comes as a "superb surprise" -- one that is dark and troubling. In Dickinson's words, it "dazzles gradually." And it does, indeed, tell "all the truth," It is quite unforgettable.
Moon-Crossed Lovers?
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.
Like two ships passing in the night, except they have sex as they pass.
Two of the oldest and maybe most common activities or "professions" are here, war and prostitution. As old and as ever present war has been in society, so has paying for sex or at least getting by force. Are both evil? Or are they necessities? While the book doesn't necessarily provide answers, those are some questions that remain with me after reading this book. Both have victims, there is money/resources and the need for it, and there is an imbalance of power and (mis)use of that power.
Rabe creates some thoughtful refined prose which fits particularly well and is enjoyable to read. I have never read Rabe before or watched his plays. I was drawn to the book by the topic and the supposed origin of the story as it relates to "The Tale of Kieu." Admittedly, I didn't like the first half of the book, at least with the American soldier, but that is me. He was too sex crazed and neutral about going to Vietnam. While I am OK with the non-political take, he didn't seem too interesting pre-Vietnam. The focus was his search for sex with whomever is available, such as borrowing someone's girlfriend or from an ex who was married. The portrayal of the Vietnamese prostitute is somewhat authentic, particularly with the subject of duty and abuse. Let's face it, it is not too hard to find a tragic character in Vietnam especially with women and children. In Vietnam and in a time of war, there is nothing glamorous or romantic about being a prostitute, and Rabe doesn't make it so.
A particular complaint I have is given the limited contact and fleeting interaction between the two, it is a stretch for the girl to put such emotional hope in the American. Maybe she didn't but the reader likely will think or hope so. Which leads to my ***Warning sociopolitical opinion forthcoming*** problem with the whole theme of a white knight saving the girl or the damaged girl that needs saving gets a little old as with movies (Pretty Woman etc), theatre (Miss Saigon) and even Disney (see Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, etc). The book stops just short of that, barely, but I would have enjoyed reading Rabe without the possible theme or back drop of an American rescuing a woman of color prostitute. And it is not that, really, but close, if that makes any sense. I give it 3.5 stars, almost 4 because the writing is very good and I like the length, but definitely not a 3 which I consider just average.
Shattering novel of poetic prose.
Previously published at: [...]
I was terrified! From somewhere deep inside, there was a presence, a deep-rooted sense that my ultimate fate would be to die in a rice paddy -- if I went to Viet Nam. My family and my community had instilled an equally deep sense of patriotism in my psyche. My father was a World War II survivor. My sister's father died in the Philippine Islands in the same war. My size and lack of street smarts left me out of the "survivor" category and more towards the "victim" role. My birthday came up at number 65 in the December draft lottery of 1969 and when I started college in the summer of 1970, I was classified 2-S, student. Those factors gave me significant incentive to study, not to mention the mental images reported by television and LIFE magazine. The photograph that was later known as "Reaching Out" made me nauseous; I couldn't look at it for years. It's still a disturbing image.
Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe begins with Joe Whitaker's visit to the Washington Memorial amidst anti-war demonstrations on the mall. He had difficulty maintaining his focus and experienced no enjoyment from his last stint as a tourist because of the piece of paper in his pocket. It was a neatly folded copy of his order to go to the war. "Fingering the shape of the papers outlining his fate beneath the cloth of his jacket, he is bewildered by the power of the document," and then, "How can paper move him? Incredibly, his hand is shaking." For me, it's 1969 again, and I feel his terror. Can I deal with the fear forty years later? I can't put the book down.
Another story line develops as we meet Quach Ngoc Lan who is Vietnamese. What could a girl who stands by the road at night in 1969 be other than a prostitute? These two characters are destined to meet. When and for how long will the two stories merge -- and will they diverge?
We come to know each character by hearing their thoughts and observing their actions as Rabe puts us in the story with poetic prose that creates vivid mental images using brief interactions and short but meaningful conversations. We don't need all the details. We are there. We know what happens next. We know how the story ends. We keep reading to experience the emotions of the characters and learn something of ourselves. A third party character has learned and taught her children that manners require that a decent person conceal news of misfortune whenever possible. Her manners disquiet the reader.
The story challenges my conscience. Could something like this happen to me today? How would I react? Are my morals intact and do I have the strength to act out my spoken convictions? In my heart, I want to be reassured, to have my mind put at ease, even if what is kept from me is very bad.
David Rabe's jet-black comedy about drugs, sex, despair and death in substance-fueled 1980s Hollywood gets the Who Wants Cake? treatment this April starring