A Dangerous Friend

Rating:
Summary: Best Novel of 1999
Review: It's a shame that this novel wasn't a finalist for the National Book Award this year. It deserves the honor. A Dangerous Friend is utterly original in its portrait of the early years of American intervention in Vietnam. Ward Just perfectly captures the innocence, avarice, hubris, ignorance, and paranoia of the time. He liberates a genre that is, perhaps, exhausted, and at the very least, well-defined. A war novel without the physical violence (although there's plenty of the emotional kind), A Dangerous Friend captures the fine (sometimes irrelevent) distinctions between military and civilian, colonist and native, hero and villain. Simply, powerfully superb.

Rating:
Summary: Understated beauty
Review: The beauty of this novel is the understated way in which it is told.

I'd been meaning to read this book since it first came out last year and finally sat down with it over the weekend ... and couldn't put it down. In just a spare 256 pages, Ward Just recreates the fallen splendor of colonial Vietnam at the start of the conflict and examines the opposing philosophies of those caught in the gathering maelstrom - the American government presence there to provide "humanitarian" aid and support the rapidly diminishing infrastructure and the expatriate colonials who have lived there for years in relative calm and peace who are unwilling to give up what they call home for the sake of political interventionists who, they believe, have little relevance on their lives.

It's a delicate book but one that gives you pause to think. Ward Just is an verbal wizard at providing descriptions of climate and landscape. His characters are finely drawn and subtle (one might almost say understated) and the plot, while not particularly dramatic in the more traditional sense, evolves in such a way the reader knows something terrible is going to happen because the inevitability is there.

In some ways, this book reminded me of the French film done several years ago, "Indochine", with Catherine Deneuve. While the film is set in the 30's and chronicles the start of the Communist conflict in Vietnam, it portrays a similar crisis of conscience between the old established colonial point of view and the rapidly changing tides of modern history.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite there
Review: There were some interesting aspects to this book, most especially the decision by the author to focus on the early days of the Vietnam War--a topic not discussed nearly enough. That being said, I nonetheless felt that the characters and storyline were underdeveloped. He could have gone so much deeper with this. I never felt I fully understood the characters, that is the deeper complexities undoubtedly harbored being in such a unique situation. In fact, I could not believe it when I realized I had only 50 pages left to read. It seemed like the story was just beginning to develop.