A Vietnam vet and lack lustre diplomat and part time friend to Uncle Sam via handlers at the CIA, receives a package from an old ‘nam friend, prompting the first half of the book: A proper, fairly granular accounting of his time in Vietnam, pertaining predominately to two individuals and how he came to be recruited by the CIA in Saigon, in the first place. In the second half of the novel (roughly), the memories prompt him to sojourn out in search of a question that’s been growing in his gut the entire time he’s been alive.

This was well written, with description going into the poetic and semi melodramatic at the right times. For my taste, the Vietnam section is a bit overwritten, and I always prefer a diegetic solution to people remembering things within fiction, rather than a complete digression into some other kind of perspective and narration. If it’s his story, why the hell isn’t he telling it in his own words and his memory, when ostensibly the rest of the fiction is him doing that already, right? Anyway, just a pet peeve I have.

It’s perfectly serviceable and draws out themes around disillusionment in the things young men often have, when they go off to war and eat the party line. The contrast works quite well with the narration coming from an older age, reminiscing, and the calcification of experience and knowledge accrued in later years. Then, a kind of reckoning—a search for an answer, means for possible amends—but absolution being a more complex and difficult thing to come by in this kind of story - being literary and not genre fiction in the least. It’s slow, methodical, and quite quotable.