(Editor's Note: You may be wondering while we're reviewing a novel in "&" rather than in Bookshelf. To clarify: Bookshelf dedicates an entire month to a representative selection of releases from a small press, while & covers individual releases. While Akashic and some other publishers send us their books on a regular basis, we don't want to hold them 'til we have enough to cover in Bookshelf. Hence the confusion.)
The genre novel is a notoriously difficult way to develop a literary reputation -- even if the burgeoning author is successful, he/she often ends up either pigeonholed, ignored by the larger reading public, or both. Kurt Vonnegut's humor, intelligence, brilliance and even his humanity were overlooked for years because he was lumped with the robot-obsessed in the unfashionable backwater of science fiction. The same applies to lesser writers; If John Grisham was to write a novel without a lawyer in it, it would probably be judged similarly. This would, of course, assume that a lawyer-free Grisham is more likely than, say, the Earth spontaneously spiraling into the sun.
In addition to the scorn of the literati, the genre writer must deal with the shadow of his precursors in the form. When it comes to the American war novel, the list is long, distinguished and imposing. From Stephen Crane to Tim O'Brien, there is a proud history of American fiction facing down the horrors and realities of war in a way that our popular memory does not.
It is into this discourse on man's most singular and awful passion that Daniel Buckman thrusts himself with his debut novel, Water In Darkness. A veteran of the peacetime military, he is hardly the first with an urge to channel what he saw into art. His approach, while not unique, at least indicates a spark of originality -- he couches his boilerplate I-can't-get-over-the-horrors-of-Vietnam book within the tale of a soldier in the late eighties, who has just left active duty.
Jack Tyne is a quiet man who has served his time well, joining the airborne rangers and trying to avoid the petty cruelties he sees around him. Jack's father died in Vietnam before Jack could meet him, and Jack spent his gothically awful childhood watching his sister being molested by his stepfather. The latter serves as the Freudian underpinning of Jack's self-loathing (he didn't stop it, his sister enjoyed it, he was attracted to his sister, etc.), and the former informs his inability to form any kind of self-image.
The opening chapters of this book are a profanity-ridden delineation of mob mentality. A near-retarded soldier is ridiculed by his NCO; the new recruits have the living shit beaten out of them by the old hands. Finally, a young, effete college boy is assaulted in the night by a group of homophobic grunts with bars of soap in their socks. Now, not having joined any branch of the armed service, I am hardly in a position to comment on the reality or fantasy of the preceding and any of the number of unrelentingly terrible views of Army life Buckman treats us to. I am, however, a fan of great war fiction, and feel safe in declaring that this isn't it.
The sad old shadow of a man required for this type of becoming-a-man-and-discovering-your-roots novel is portrayed by a disgraced cop named Morrison. His cocaine addiction and, you guessed it, obsession with what he saw in 'Nam have ruined his life, marriage and health, and have driven him to collecting bad debts for a Greek restaurateur/loan shark, who is almost as egregious an ethnic parody as the unending stream of bit-player black characters in this novel (more on this later).
After a brief and unhappy return to the Midwestern town of his birth, Jack moves to Chicago, where he is savagely beaten by the aforementioned blacks. Morrison happens upon the youth, takes him in and tenderly nurses him back to health. Morrison's experiences in Vietnam parallel those Jack imagines his dead father might have had. Morrison sees Jack as the son he never had, and tries to educate him in the realities of the terrible pointlessness of life in order to save him from a fate similar to his own. The bulk of the text consists of these two characters pinballing from one hideous circumstance to the next, first apart and then together. By this point, the novel has become a father/son relationship story and, given the self-consciously bleak tone of the proceedings, a sensible reader can reasonably predict the end of the story by the time he/she reaches the book's midpoint.
And this brings us to the crux of why this not a good novel.
One can describe many books as "cinematic", but this has to be the first time that a book can be described as "directed by Oliver Stone". It has the same sort of feeling one finds in Stone's lesser films -- the violence and verbal savagery amounts to Buckman leering over your shoulder, grunting, "look at how savagely that guy was beaten. I'm an artist. Doesn't it make you uncomfortable? Am I not transgressive?"
It's not that violence and bigotry cannot be used as a tool to depict a savage world. Read Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy, to whom Buckner's lurid press material compares him. It's just that originality with regard to the description of everyday horrors demands more of the writer than a willingness to juxtapose novel adjectives to nouns. As far as the absurd level of racial hostility present in the novel is concerned, it almost seems that Buckman is employing the often-nameless black characters as a tool with which to establish the unrelenting horror of daily existence, whether in the army or the underbelly of Chicago. Unfortunately, as racial commentary it's stale, as characterization it's caricature, and as reality it's decidedly surreal. Take the following dialogue sample:
"I was telling my boys here that you ain't too proud to drink after a nigger," Felder said. "None of them believe me. That's why I'm saying you're all white..."
"This cracker just wants to drink before a nigger and spit in the backwash," he said. "Then beat my old boy up. Lynch the poor nigger before he gets to talking with the other niggers."
"First Sergeant gave the order," Jack said.
"Shit cracker," said Pickens. "That tom motherfucker has been in the army so long he's whiter than your momma."
After a while, this sort of "hard edged" dialogue just becomes stilted and boring. It grates on the reader's ears, but not in such a way that he is forced to contemplate eternal verities of race and human relations; rather, it sounds like the writing of a man who is excited to be getting away with saying "nigger" in a book.
Fortunately, Buckman is a considerably better writer when he is purely descriptive. Some of his images waver to either the trite or the overreaching, but there are numerous solid and well-crafted mental monologues that, at points, make the book gripping.
Old men sat on buckets and fished uselessly from the Court Street Bridge, their shadows upon the sidewalk like bodies fallen over. He went past Aldens and Carsons deparment stores with no fineries on view behind the dusty windows, only leas placards offering so many square feet, then past the bronze Union soldier who stood watch on the courthouse lawn while hamburger bags crept in the gutters from the hot wind. The parking meters were gone like the town, this commercial street reduced to vacant storefronts and unnamed taverns and a currency exchange where the welfare poor stood in a long line while their spastic children gyrated and wrestled on the sidewalks.
Finally, then, Water in Darkness may just be a misfired first shot from a war novelist who may yet produce something violent yet beautiful, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Until then, you're better off watching Platoon again. That's what I would guess Buckman is doing right now.
-- Brett McCallon
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