Girl by the Road at Night : A Novel of Vietnam

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. The New York Times - Philip Caputo …[not] a war novel except in the loosest sense of the term. Rather, it's an erotic love story about two young people from opposite ends of the earth caught up in events far beyond their control. It's also a meditation on the devastating effects armed conflict has on society, and on the psychological and emotional toll it exacts from soldiers and civilians alike. Above all, it's a modern tragedy in which the war, like the somber moors in Tess of the D Urbervilles, becomes a metaphor for cruelty and injustice, for fate itself…In a brief afterword, Rabe suggests that he was partly inspired by "The Tale of Kieu," an early-19th-century epic poem by Vietnam's Shakespeare, Nguyen Du. The original title was "A New Cry From a Broken Heart," because Du wanted his poem to be a scream hurled against injustice and the harshness of fate, a scream to break the heart. Girl by the Road at Night is Rabe's cry, and it deserves to be heard. "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." -- from publisher's website Private Joseph Whitaker, with his Vietnam deployment papers in hand, spends his last weekend trying to find anyone who will acknowledge what he is about to do matters. In Saigon a prostitute, Quach Ngoc Lan, spends her days haggling and submitting to physical mortification - their chance encounter in Saigon forges a surprising connection