Water in Darkness - Hardcover

Buckman, Daniel

3.75

12 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 188845119X ISBN 13: 9781888451191

Publisher: Akashic Books,U.S., 2001

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Water in Darkness is a taut, disturbing novel that plumbs the depths of human sadness. The book opens within the last months of Jack Tyne's enlistment in the U.S. Army. Tyne is a young soldier haunted by the anonymous death of his father at Hue City during the Vietnam War, and by childhood memories of his stepfather's brutality. On the evening before his discharge, Jack covers his ears and hides in self-loathing while an effeminate soldier, also orphaned by Vietnam, takes a beating. He ultimately returns home to Watega, Illinois and wanders amongst the ruins of stove factories and steel mills long gone South, only to discover the same frustrated America that had forced his escape into the army. He quickly drifts north to Chicago and works day labor, hoping to beat memory, evade conscience, and become invisible. There he meets Danny Morrison, a Vietnam Veteran dismissed from the Chicago Police Department for cocaine abuse. This violent, dispossessed man, filled with his own strange lusts, becomes a surrogate father for Jack Tyne, quickly pulling him into the dark heart of our violent culture.

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Review:

. . . [F]ans of smart, macho prose will find much to like in this debut novel. -- Publishers Weekly

Daniel Buckman has managed...to convey the sense of futility and hopelessness...with remarkable finesse in his first published novel, Water in Darkness. -- New York Press

Just when you think it is safe to forget about the Vietnam War, something forces it back into consciousness . . . Perhaps it is a book like Water in Darkness. -- Los Angeles Times

Water in Darkness is a wonderful novel, with an interesting view of the world. -- Bookbrowser website

From the Publisher:

Heir to the impressionistic tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Buckman uses psychological landscapes and terse dialogue to tell his story of the Vietnam War's living legacy—the generation born during the Summer of Love who never knew their country disassociated from My Lai or Martin Luther King's assassination. Buckman's America is a wasteland of absurd cities and drought-stricken cornfields where the moral high-ground afforded it after VE Day lingers like an ironic mirage, a place where there can be no illusions of innocence, only reminders that innocence is itself illusory.

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