Book Review : Vietnam: Uncured Plague of Violence in America

American Blood by John Nichols (Holt: $17.95)

John Nichols has written a novel about a disease and its complication. The disease is the Vietnam War; the complication is that it has been virtually forgotten without ever having been cured, and that, like an uneradicated infection, it continues to poison our blood.

Nichols’ fictional premise is not new. Bobbie Ann Mason’s beautiful novel “In Country” also linked the notion of prematurely buried historical memory to current illness. In that case, the exemplary disease was the aftereffects of Agent Orange, suffered by a veteran trying to make a life for himself in a small Kentucky town.

For Nichols, the link is much harsher and more extravagant. He associates random killings, mutilations, the taking of ears as trophies, as practiced by some Americans in Vietnam, with those particularly horrifying acts of violence that have taken place in our country over the last decade. Bestiality, in “American Blood,” is a retributory plague that has traveled from Vietnam to the United States.

It is a brutal and scarifying book. It begins with a Marine detachment taking shelter from the rain in a Vietnam village. One of its members, Carp, shoots a Vietnamese child out of sheer boredom and irritation. A pig comes along, sniffs at the child’s abdominal wound, and proceeds to eat him alive.

The narrator, Michael Smith, describes it in unbearable detail. With the same detail, he describes other atrocities committed by the detachment: killing an old man found relieving himself on a trail, taking a woman prisoner up in a helicopter, gang-raping her, cutting her throat, shooting her and throwing her out. Here and in other horrors, Carp is the initiator, but all of them participate; and Smith is at least passively acquiescent.

After the war, Smith drifts; eventually ending up in a small town in the Southwest, where Carp also lives. He registers, obsessively, every brutal killing reported in the press; he becomes a newspaper photographer who takes pictures of car wrecks and bodies. He lives like a zombie until he takes up with Janine, an aging but sexy cafe waitress who is trying to bring up her teen-aged daughter, Cathie.

Afflicted by nightmares, Smith is genuinely in love; but it is a love plagued by violent images. And then, Cathie is abducted, hideously tortured, raped and killed. Janine breaks down. Simultaneously nursing and seeking out the murderer--it turns out to be Carp, of course--Smith goes through a lavishly described hell. Eventually, he begins to work his way out, having finally purged the violence of the past by confronting it in himself.

This sounds like the synopsis of a grand opera; a contemporary grand opera, shading into Grand Guignol. Nichols writes in a fiery, sweeping style. With extremely broad strokes, he makes the particular stand for the general. The atrocities of the Marine detachment represent the entire Vietnamese war; the brutal killing of Cathie symbolizes all of American life, from television commercials, to microwave ovens, to right-wing bumper stickers, to unlicensed gun-ownership.

There is a point to it. If Nichols inflates My Lai to include everything that happened in Vietnam, and if he swells our domestic violence so as to taint all of American life, it is in order to chide our forgetfulness; our readiness to make an abstraction out of social and political evils.

The trouble is, that while “American Blood” manages to set out the disease in striking terms, it is a disease without a patient. Carp is an abstract monster with one or two recognizable beer-belly attributes. Smith and Janine have little individual characterization. He is wired, strung-out and tough-talking; damaged, but with a heart of gold. She is independent, floozy-like--though not really a floozy--and tough-talking; again, damaged, but with a heart of the same metal.

Their anger and their suffering carry conviction. Smith’s patient care of Janine through a period of catatonic withdrawal is movingly portrayed; it is the best of the book’s vociferous, vivid, but generally characterless writing.