Customer Reviews

The Names of the Dead

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is not your typical Viet Nam read. As usual, Stewart O'Nan takes his incredible literary skills to a new dimension. He portrys the life of a young medic in his first mission in Viet Nam. His experiences are gripping as you track this vulnerable young kid on the plane there, and eventually living with the guys in his unit and out on their daily duties. Included in the recount of his experiences, is the hell he is going with as he struggles to adapt and make peace with himself. I passed this book on to several friends who were in Viet Nam. When one of them handed the book back to me, I asked them what they thought of it. I got a nod, a silence, and a choked up stammering response. It was so good, he couldn't even talk to me about it yet. We will talk about it some day, I hope. After a while, perhaps, when it doesn't seem so real to him. I knew to wait and be patient.

Stewart O'Nan plunges the reader into the chambers of horrors that are the aftermath of Vietnam. He understands the razoredge tension of being underfire, the hopelessness of being without the security of even minimal coping that eats the brains of many Vietnam Vets, and he knows the vagaries of the promised paths of healing from physical and mental war wounds. Some writers describe actual moments of battle contact better than O'Nan but few dig into the battle rattle that so chronically impaled the men and boys who came home from Vietnam. And with all this ammunition on board, O'Nan has written a very fine novel that is, yes, grounded in the sequelae of war, but succeeds in unraveling a fascinating story of at least one man's survival. This is a pithy book and deserves to be placed on the shelf along with O'Brien, Caputo, Turner and the other fine writers who still struggle to make sense out of the irrational Vietnam error.

I'm a viet vet (navy)- found the book well written with excellent descriptions of action and inaction throughout. I would have given it 5 stars, but I didn't understand the ending. The present-day plot doesn't wrap up until the final 4 or 5 pages. It left me confused as to what, why, how... and I really was interested in knowing w,w,h. I suppose it could be that I'm just dense or maybe it's supposed to be indefinite, but if anyone can clue me in, I'd appreciate it (by email- I don't want to give the ending away).

Reading Stewart O'Nan's fiction writings is like being an invisible observer of common people experiencing and reflecting on lives that are anything but ordinary. The Names of the Dead is the story of Vietnam vet Larry Markham, a man who can't let go of the war that refuses to let go of him. O'Nan deftly intertwines horrifying war flashbacks, "A shallow gash sliced across his lifeline. He'd taken a piece of shrapnel or cut it on something. As he bandaged himself, he realized it must have been on the stub of Dumb Andy's femur." with the tedium of the routines of everyday life, "Downtown he emptied his trays one by one, kneeling to square the boxes, checking the expiration dates. Wonder White, Wonder Wheat." This touching novel deals with mental illness, the onset of Alzheimer's Disease, infidelity and more of life's major issues. Though lacking the resolve and insight found at the end of O'Nan's Snow Angels do not miss out on the beauty and horror (and suspense!) of The Names of the Dead.

Best book I have ever read about Vietnam (and I served there). Beautifully written, moving, accurate and compassionate. If you only read one book about Vietnam in your life, make it this one

This is not your typical Viet Nam read. As usual, Stewart O'Nan takes his incredible literary skills to a new dimension. He portrys the life of a young medic in his first mission in Viet Nam. His experiences are gripping as you track this vulnerable young kid on the plane there, and eventually living with the guys in his unit and out on their daily duties. Included in the recount of his experiences, is the hell he is going with as he struggles to adapt and make peace with himself. I passed this book on to several friends who were in Viet Nam. When one of them handed the book back to me, I asked them what they thought of it. I got a nod, a silence, and a choked up stammering response. It was so good, he couldn't even talk to me about it yet. We will talk about it some day, I hope. After a while, perhaps, when it doesn't seem so real to him. I knew to wait and be patient.

This was the first novel I've read by Stewart O'Nan and I was very impressed by his style. Although the book bathed the reader in Vietnam's horrors, it also, surprisingly, had occasional glimpses of wry humor which, because of the gore involved, were oases of relief. I congratulate O'Nan on the successful completion of a book on the most difficult of subjects -- war and it's atrocities. I'm looking forward to reading more from O'Nan.

I picked up a copy of Speed Queen in Asia (because it was the only book in English that I could find), and was very glad that I had. This led me to read The Names of the Dead.

O'Nan is especially good at establishing a sense of _place_. He has the ability to judge the tempo, the pulse, and convey that very cleverly, not through direct statement but often by sidelong observation. The book benefits greatly from this, establishing a sense of the (often mundane) key differences between life pre-Vietnam, in Vietnam, and post-Vietnam, highlighting the sheer intensity of the short central period of the main character's life.

I did find the book flawed. The point of fascination was in watching a man fixated with love and hate, fixated on a point in time; a point in time that others could not necessarily see, and which he could not explain, least of all to himself. The main character's manner of addressing his fixation was the drama - the way that he excluded certain others from his experience, yet also wanted to share his experience. The suspense was in following him to discover whether he would resolve the issue, albeit in a flawed way, and if so, how. However, along the way O'Nan decides to introduce a plot line resembling that of a thriller, which might be interesting, but which seemed somewhat unnecessary, and possibly distracting.

Overall though, the book is definitely worth reading to understand the nature of contrast,the relativity of episodes in life, and the difficulties in the communication of experience between individuals.

Recommended.

There are two stories in Stewart O'Nan's THE NAMES OF THE DEAD. The first, and perhaps the most important, is the story of what happened to army medic Larry Markham and his buddies in the Vietnam War in 1968-69. And this story is told in what is perhaps some of the most graphically horrific language seen in all the literature that has emerged from that conflict. And there's been a lot, believe me.

I was held in the grip of that narrative for most of the nearly 400 pages, although I found the first half of the story just a little slow. It was like O'Nan was rolling the massive boulder of his story up a steep grade as he introduced all the characters and carefully and methodically set the scene. But once he reached the top, which was right about two hundred pages in, the story rolled downhill at a breakneck pace that kept you turning the pages and hanging on every word and phrase.

The second story is the postwar one, of what has happened to Larry Markham in the dozen-plus years since he came home from the war, the only survivor of his original squad, missing a foot and plagued by terrors and self-doubt as his dead friends visit him nightly in dreams. He drives a Twinkie truck by day and leads a weekly discussion group of, damaged Vietnam vets at the local VA hospital in his hometown of Ithaca, New York, trying along with the others to sort it all out and make some sense of it. Together these vets make plans for Larry to visit the then-new memorial Wall in D.C., where "the names of the dead" in all their thousands are inscribed.

His wife, Vicki, understands none of this and has left him, taking their eight year-old son who has physical and mental disabilities (perhaps resulting from Larry's exposure to napalm and Agent Orange). Learning she's been having an affair, Larry begins a relationship with his mentally unstable next-door neighbor, Donna, whose husband has left with their children. The strange thing about this aspect of the story is that there is no one to blame. Everyone is hurting - Larry, Vicki, Donna. I mean it's a mess, but you end up feeling for all of these people. If there's a villain, then it's the war, which has poisoned everything for the returning vets like Larry and his group members.

Add to all of this another disfigured and very mentally ill special forces (Phoenix) vet who is stalking both Larry and his physician father (a WWII vet and former POW whose story is a minor but fascinating subplot all its own) and you have all the makings of a macabre and gripping thriller, perhaps in the manner of Stephen King. (Ironically, both Vicki and Larry's father are both reading the same King novel, which is not named.)

Maybe you've figured out by now that this is not a simple novel. It's complicated, and - more to the point - it's damn GOOD! The one thing I can't figure out here is how O'Nan, who was only fourteen years old when the U.S. got out of Vietnam, managed to tell the story of the war so absolutely dead-on perfectly - the feel of the jungle warfare, the casually obscene GI language, the horror of the disfiguring wounds and violent deaths. I mean ALL of this is so real, so pitch perfect. How did he DO this? I don't know. But he carried it off magnificently. This guy writes like he was there. I was reminded of several other Vietnam books I've read, from William Pelfrey's THE BIG V (the first novel to come out of the war in the early 70s) to Karl Marlantes recent bestseller, MATTERHORN. Or - from the memoir side - John Ketwig's ... AND A HARD RAIN FELL, Frederick Downs's THE KILLING ZONE or Robert Mason's CHICKENHAWK. There are plenty of books I could cite here, but the important thing is Stewart O'Nan's book can stand with the best of them. A tremendous literary achievement. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

O'Nan is either psychic or remote-views. He's probably the most in-tune writer I've read. In-tune with what it means to be human, and in-tune with each of his characters' individual stories, their own life-dramas. He just seems to know so much and feels so much. And then to render that, to write it so well, so disciplined (though this book is longer than his others), yet so pithily lyrical. It's simple. He's one of our best.

To say this book is a melodrama is unfair, I think. Makes it sound cheap. It isn't. This is a fine novel, gripping, real, human, full of pathos with a sliver of redemption. Just a tripwire's worth, but redemption nonetheless. Through this book, as with O'Brien's, I really got a sense of what it was/is like for Vietnam vets and vets of all stripe. What they see and do during their time in country shapes the rest of their lives, recasts their pasts, in both directions a reverberation of horrors.

Highly recommended.