Twenty years after the Bureau of Reclamation fails to build the Mekong River dam that would have won the Vietnam War, four people try to put together what went wrong and learn the true mission of the Bureau. A first novel.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A complex conspiracy drives this fully imagined but very awkwardly structured first novel. At its center is the Bureau of Reclamation, a covert American engineering corps that sets out to flood Vietnam in postwar 1973 by constructing a dam designed to self-destruct. Set in the present, the novel is narrated by Gailly Harper, a writer who taps the memories of those who were involved in the project. Gailly is sought out by his brother, Jim, a talented engineer recruited by the ominous Bureau for the Vietnam dam. The Harpers have a history with rivers and dams: their mother believed she could converse with and control the Monongahela River in their Appalachian Pennsylvania hometown?a town ultimately flooded by the Bureau. Jim's friend Petard Davidson, a Digger Indian whose ancestral homeland was similarly destroyed, is a genius hydraulics engineer who hates the Bureau projects on which he works. An expert at sabotaging his own creations before they can destroy the environment, he reverses field in Vietnam, secretly making the dams work so that the devastating flooding never occurs. This is both a technically detailed thriller and an overwrought literary novel. The omnipotent Bureau (whose existence predates that of the U.S.) would be right at home in the paranoid imagination of Thomas Pynchon, to whom the book owes a spiritual debt and from whom Richards could still learn much about spicing earnest soapboxing with the pleasures of comedy. The central theme?that the human mania for manipulating the environment is easily corrupted?is a powerful one. But it's a one-note point that, in Richards's densely elliptical storytelling, is distractingly convoluted.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This engrossing debut novel describes a highly organized undercover operation during the Vietnam War to destroy the fertile rice fields around the Mekong Delta. The lives of four characters intertwine in a series of events that mix feats of engineering and magic. The narrator learns that the motives and the sabotage of the dams were known to the Bureau of Reclamation, which used this information to further its own ends. In a twisted turn of events, selected dams are sabotaged while a planned system of secondary dams is spared, preventing the famine predicted to follow the war. Richards effectively contrasts the central role that rivers play in Vietnamese life with Americans who lived in close alliance with rivers before the extensive construction of dams. As the narrator's mother comments, "The river takes back what the river gives...everything is a return to the river." Rich in metaphor, this novel offers a glimpse of river culture, flourishing in other countries but sadly removed from our national experience. Highly recommended for all collections.?David A. Berona, Westbrook Coll. Lib., Portland, Me.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential American fiction!,
By calicodrum (New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Zero Tolerance (Hardcover)
Thomas Richards had written one of the best American novels of the last 15 years. No one else except Pynchon has had the courage and vision to write as evocatively and brilliantly about the real forces (and catastrophes) that have shaped what America has become. Better than Franzen, more lucidly than DeLillo, Richards' flowing picaresque narrative leads us across the territories of family, of war, politics, wilderness and technology. A delirious but deeply human book, especially relevant now.
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