Because the Rain: A Novel

By Daniel Buckman

Book Overview

"A new Hemingway" (San Francisco Chronicle) weaves together the stories of two men and the Vietnamese call girl who unites them. Set on the rain-slicked streets of Chicago, critically acclaimed author Daniel Buckman explores the unfocused longing and unfulfilled expectations of two men balanced precariously on the edge. Mike Spence is an unsatisfied writer with nothing left to write about. He lives in Chicago with his wife and an enormous burden of unrealized expectations hanging over his head. To escape he concocts elaborate fantasies about travel and career and how his life will be different once he gets this job, takes that vacation, marries a different girl. He ends each evening staring out his darkened window and into the apartment of a beautiful Vietnamese girl who lives in the two-flat across the street. Donald Goetzler is a Vietnam Vet who made it through, spent the last thirty years of his life riding a desk at Weber Industrial Supply, and is now retiring with a bad Mexican buffet and a gold Rolex. He's got nothing to look forward to but his weekly session with the Vietnamese call girl who takes him back through his memories of when he was young and his life was real. As the two men construct their elaborate fantasy worlds around the same woman, these three souls are unaware of the shocking and explosive consequences that the intersection of their lives will bring In a beautifully crafted novel, Daniel Buckman demonstrates the prodigious talent that informs repeated comparisons to Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, and O'Brien, and once again tantalizes with the possibility that his name will one day be etched in American literature alongside the masters..

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312362684
• ISBN13: 9780312362683
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

"People don't think about veterans the way I know them to end up."

Mike Spence is a Viet Nam vet and published novelist who has quit writing, opting for employment with the Chicago PD: "I won't keep letting some dream humiliate me." He's paid too high a price for that dream and is now confronted by a city filled with entitlement, well-dressed young men in SUVs who don't have any idea of what soldiering means, Mike's world as separated as two continents, this one and Viet Nam. Yet another vet, Donald Goetzler spent his time in country policing his brothers in uniform, returning to the security of a corporate job, from which he has just retired. Donald also views everything through the prism of the war, both men's futures shaped by an exotic, brutal experience that delivered harsh lessons in loyalty, survival and the profitable ways of war. Now the US is on the cusp of another war, this time in Iraq, Viet Nam a distant memory save to those whose lives have been profoundly changed by the conflict. A murder and a photograph trigger Spence's identification with the frustrations of soldiers returned to a home country that hardly remembers the nightmare, tuned into the fine points of the murder while other cops look away, molding theories to fit the crime. In such subtle measures does the author build his story on the troubled histories of two vets, each involved, if only tangentially, with Anne, a Vietnamese woman who has assumed a particular place in each man's imagination: "Without her the cop will become junkie sick." She is the link to their past, the history that follows them like a black cloud, infecting their days and burdening their dreams while the rest of the world moves on, oblivious: "You have to realize the inevitability of things or you'll never move on." A complex tale, the intensely poetic prose creates fractured images, leaking from the protagonists' psyches, blink-quick insights that fade before the picture is complete. The author imbues his novel with an otherworldly ambiance, the wet of rain a reminder of Vietnamese jungles and endless tears, of brokenness and loss, of cynicism and despair. In the end, a haunted past leaves three people without words, the ravages of war all consuming in a blind city, remnants of Viet Nam embedded in their souls, a long-awaited vengeance surfacing like a sleek shark. Luan Gaines/ 2008.