From a quiet family farm in Montana in the 60s to the grit and haze of San Francisco in the 70s to a gypsy-populated, post-war Saigon, The Given World spins around its unconventional and unforgettable heroine, Riley. When her big brother is declared MIA in Vietnam, young Riley packs up her shattered heart and leaves her family, her first love, and “a few small things” behind. By trial and error she builds a new life, working on cars, delivering newspapers, tending bar. She befriends, rescues, and is rescued by a similarly vagabond cast of characters whose “‘unraveled souls’ sting hardest and linger the longest” (The New York Times Book Review). Foolhardy, funny, and wise, Riley’s challenge as she grows into a woman is simple: survive long enough to go home again, or at least figure out where home is, and who might be among the living there.
Lorrie Moore said, “It’s been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world.” The Given World is “an immensely rewarding and remarkable debut” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
From a quiet family farm in Montana in the 60s to the grit and haze of San Francisco in the 70s to a gypsy-populated, post-war Saigon, The Given World spins around its unconventional and unforgettable heroine, Riley. When her big brother is declared MIA in Vietnam, young Riley packs up her shattered heart and leaves her family, her first love, and “a few small things” behind. By trial and error she builds a new life, working on cars, delivering newspapers, tending bar. She befriends, rescues, and is rescued by a similarly vagabond cast of characters whose “‘unraveled souls’ sting hardest and linger the longest” (The New York Times Book Review). Foolhardy, funny, and wise, Riley’s challenge as she grows into a woman is simple: survive long enough to go home again, or at least figure out where home is, and who might be among the living there.
Lorrie Moore said, “It’s been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world.” The Given World is “an immensely rewarding and remarkable debut” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
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Overview
From a quiet family farm in Montana in the 60s to the grit and haze of San Francisco in the 70s to a gypsy-populated, post-war Saigon, The Given World spins around its unconventional and unforgettable heroine, Riley. When her big brother is declared MIA in Vietnam, young Riley packs up her shattered heart and leaves her family, her first love, and “a few small things” behind. By trial and error she builds a new life, working on cars, delivering newspapers, tending bar. She befriends, rescues, and is rescued by a similarly vagabond cast of characters whose “‘unraveled souls’ sting hardest and linger the longest” (The New York Times Book Review). Foolhardy, funny, and wise, Riley’s challenge as she grows into a woman is simple: survive long enough to go home again, or at least figure out where home is, and who might be among the living there.
Lorrie Moore said, “It’s been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world.” The Given World is “an immensely rewarding and remarkable debut” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781476778051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2015 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Given World
Jasper says this is the kind of heat that makes people in Australia shoot each other. Or stab. Strangle. Run over. Whatever. But we are not in Australia. We are in a once-infamous city whose inhabitants still call it Saigon. It has not rained in months, but tonight it will, and the rain will go more or less unmentioned but not unnoticed. It will still be hot, but the relief will be palpable. In Australia, they will stop killing each other, but only if they get some rain there too.
We have been waiting—playing pool and drinking beer and sometimes, when we can’t take it anymore, finding air-conditioned places that will let us in. In those places, you pay the usual dollar for a 333 beer; two more dollars for the air. The Caravelle is one of those places, and the Rex, and now these fancy new restaurants appearing block by block, almost overnight. There is a swimming pool on the roof of the Rex, and it is often full of corpulent Russian tourists, suntanned like scraped cowhide. They are loud, and they never come to the Lotus. This is our bar. No air-con. Rats the size of puppies, but they stay in the dark corners, usually, until closing time.
The government here is renting Jasper from Australia so he can teach young Vietnamese pilots how to fly passenger planes. He is part of a contingent of Qantas boys—another of whom has managed to woo me into bed, which really didn’t require all that much effort. This other one looks vaguely like Jim Morrison and has a room at the Rex, with air-con and a bathtub. We are not in love; not by a long shot. If he were one of the French boys, maybe I would be in love. The Aussie is mainly in love with himself, but the bathtub is nice. It slows down the process of going crazy.
Back in February, during Tet, Jasper drank so much it almost killed him and they had to send him home. The day after the hospital set him loose, I waited on the steps of the Rex with him while they put his gear in a cab. He didn’t want to go. He’d found his place. He was almost in tears; big, broad-shouldered, rowdy Cairns bruiser, barely able to get the words out.
“Nothing for me there,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“It was in the air,” I said. “Couldn’t be helped.” He patted my shoulder. The street was still littered with mounds of pink paper from the millions of firecrackers that had gone off nonstop for three days.
They let him come back last week; he promised to behave. If he fucks up this time, he goes home for good. A little while ago he headed across the street to the Apocalypse Now, a serious bar where people go to get seriously drunk. He was shaky, even after three beers. I won’t see him come out. I won’t see him ever again.
• • •
It’s slow tonight, and since she is not needed to flirt and serve drinks, Phuong and I are hanging out at the front window. It is octagonal and quite large—maybe six or eight feet across—and contains not a bit of glass. The sill is fairly wide, meaning a person could sit on it if she were so inclined, and often I can be found perched there, gecko-like, trying to blend in. At last call, Tho, the bartender, will close the rusted aluminum accordion shutters and latch them with a heavy round padlock the diameter of a dessert plate. I wonder if the shutters are made, like so much is here, of metal salvaged from crashed American warplanes. I wonder about a lot of things at this window. Last call is still hours away.
It is April. In a few short years, Bill Clinton will mark the middle of his first term by reestablishing diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and Americans will turn up in droves; some for the first time, some not. For now, we are few and far between, and except for one in particular, I have not yet missed us very much.
This American (the one telling this story) is almost, but not quite, old enough to have been here the first time around. I don’t know where the years have gone. If I didn’t have to count the ones I don’t entirely remember, I would actually be a lot younger. This is not all that funny. I know. But it was not deliberate, either. Some things just happen. Shit happens. Everyone says so.
“Gone to Cù Chi already?” Phuong asks. “Visit brother?” By which she means have I gone by now. She says this without looking directly at me, because she knows. I have not gone. One of these days, though, maybe I will surprise her.
Mick has been away more than half my life, but this is the first time I have set out to look for him, as I have been very busy denying the undeniable. When I was a kid he would take me into the foothills of the Little Rockies on his motorcycle. He knew where to look for fossils; knew what they were when he found them. I can still see, set on the palm of his hand, a chunk of quartz etched with tiny filaments, like hairs. He tells me the etchings are the imprint of dinosaur feathers. We are in a cave, and I am holding the flashlight. I search his face to see if he is making it up, but think maybe this time he is telling the truth.
Remember this, Riley, I tell myself. Hang on to this.
To Phuong I say, “Not yet.”
She looks at me and rolls her eyes. Just up, over to one side and back again, not all the way around. Her eyebrows are pencil-line thin and perfectly arched. I would look ridiculous in those eyebrows. I tell her she looks like Madame Nhu.
“Ðiên cái d du,” she says. Crazy in the head. I agree: I have seen photos of the madame soon after her husband and his brother, South Vietnam’s president, were assassinated in 1963. She is holding court in L.A., accusing Kennedy, not a hair out of place. The woman had some nerve; you have to give her that.
It dawns on me that Phuong might not be talking about the Dragon Lady. If she isn’t, I can’t argue. Crazy is clearly my comfort zone, my DMZ. And as for visiting ghosts, the Vietnamese are used to that; it is no cause for commotion.
My brother, if I am being honest, is only one of the ghosts I have come here to visit. By which I mean the shadows in my head and not necessarily dead people, because I still don’t know. Show me a body; maybe I’ll believe.
• • •
The dive we are in, this flimsy but cozy excuse for a glitzy rock ’n’ roll nightclub, is fairly quiet at the moment—five or so regulars take turns playing pool, a few strangers and a small flock of taxi girls look on. On a suitcase-size and decoratively beat-up boom box he keeps behind the bar, Tho plays the homemade cassette tapes we give him. Tonight Prince rules the airwaves, along with The Pretenders and a little Culture Club. Some nights Tho’s box delivers the same stuff American soldiers would have listened to here: Country Joe, Sly, The Youngbloods, Three Dog Night, Aretha. Occasionally we get the soundtrack for Good Morning, Vietnam. We especially love the part where Robin Williams says, “It’s hot. It’s damn hot.” Because it is.
When the conversation about my brother hits the wall that is my refusal to acknowledge any reasonable probability, Phuong and I talk about something easier: in this case, the rain. “Troi mua,” she says, a simple statement even I can understand: it is raining.
I nod. “Rfit mua.” A lot of rain. During our nightly conversations we roam haltingly into each other’s languages, my excursions considerably more hesitant than hers, but I am learning, and Phuong has had far more practice with English.
“Wet rat,” she says, and giggles at the play on words. “Wet rat bastard.” She is not really giggling anymore, but she doesn’t sound pissed either, which makes it difficult to know for sure if she has really pegged anyone in particular for a rat bastard, or if she has been watching more old American movies on Star TV and this is just another practice persona. Probably a little of each, knowing Phuong. She sounds like Humphrey Bogart in Vietnamese drag. I do not ask, and imagine she is just messing around. I am too dreamy with beer and the heat to work it out anyway, watching my own movie, the scenes dim and sputtery as a hand-cranked newsreel.
Outside, cyclo drivers on the watch for passengers pedal their three-wheelers through fitful patches of brightness. They drift strong and stork legged, all sinew and bone skinny. Dangling from their lips or fingers are cigarettes somehow still smoldering in the rain. The way they smoke, so casually oblivious, reminds me of my father—on the porch, maybe, or out in the yard at night, looking up at the sky, for weather, but it’s not as if he could miss the stars. I hear my name in his voice: “Riley . . .” Never loud or angry, just gentle reminders: try to grow up with some degree of intentionality and grace; try to believe the world is more benevolent than not. I wonder if he knows I did hear him. I’m sure I never said. Here I am, though, working on it. Working on something.
Firelight emanates from small blazes kept alive with jet fuel and tended on the fractured sidewalks by itinerant bicycle mechanics; these men once repaired jeeps and tanks for the Americans and now keep their tools in battered, surplus, army-green ammo boxes. They have long ago forgiven us for leaving them behind. Buddhists, they say there is nothing to forgive.
My fake-French bicycle is locked up out front where I can keep an eye on it. It is how I get around in this city of five million, to my various English-teaching jobs, to the street kids’ center where I try to offer something of relative value, and into which we try to coax them from the stoops, the rain, the robbers. But the kids are so wild—wilder than wild red pandas—and they find their protection in each other, mostly coming only to eat and then disappearing again into the night.
I try to formulate in my pidgin Vietnamese an explanation for Phuong of how the cyclo guys look like those mythological birds to me, and how some kids in America are told that storks bring babies, tied up in bandanas dangling from their beaks. It sounds even more ridiculous in Vietnamese than it does in English, and it also occurs to me how many birds there are already in this story: Phuong, the phoenix, cyclo-storks, the girls at the bar, a scrawny pidgin that is my grasp of the language, a language I am learning to love, for translations like this one, for barbed wire: “steel string with thorns.”
Phuong tells me the stork story is so much baloney; she actually says, “Stork babies baloney, Chi.” Chi is what they call me here. It means big sister. Hardly anyone calls me by my actual name, but I’m used to that; I’ll answer to just about anything.
Phuong has recently been knocked up by one of our local British boys. She tells me this as we stand at the window. Ian, the father, is an old Saigon hand, having been here for three years already, captaining some kind of bamboo furniture enterprise. He is tall, blond, dubiously handsome, and wears his jaded weariness like a badge. I hear the first few years it was all he could do to stay in the country and out of prison, for uncommitted crimes.
This town is full of romantically hazardous men: Brits, Aussies, Froggies. Especially, maybe, the Froggies, with their Ça vas, their Gitanes, their sleepy eyes and sexy accents that require of a girl perpetual vigilance. Luc could be a poster child for these Froggies. He looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, and rumor has it that he is indeed here to make a movie, though I have never seen him with a camera or a lighting crew, and suspect he is really here (like me) on account of a movie he keeps in his head.
Phuong tells me he has his eye on me. “Luc like you style, Chi. Think Chi beaucoup sweetie pie.”
Luc has never said more than two words in a row to me. If he thinks I am beaucoup sweetie pie, he has a funny way of showing it. Phuong says this is because he is shy. Shy and adorable. A little young. A hazard, like I said. Besides, there is that Jim Morrison Aussie, the one I became entangled with almost as soon as I arrived, and who will very soon, and surgically, break my heart—able to do that because this is Saigon, not because the reasons I am sleeping with him have anything to do with love. Love would require a part of me that I have not been able to precisely locate or properly identify the remains of for a long time now.
So that is the romantic inventory—the pertinent bits.
At least I am not pregnant. This time. I look over at Phuong, who leans her elbows on the windowsill, her chin on her interlocked fingers. I say I am sorry for bringing up the storks.
“No worries,” she says. Then, “Shit.” Softly, infinitely sweetly. She picked that up from me, I think—the word, not the delicate delivery of it. I never heard her say it before we started hanging out together at the window.
“Don’t say ‘shit,’ ” I say. “It’s not ladylike.”
“What is ladylike?”
“Like a lady.”
“Woman?” she asks. She looks puzzled, those fine eyebrows drawn together to meet above the bridge of her delicate nose. Her delicate nose that matches the rest of her delicate self. I feel like an Amazon next to her, all five and a half feet of me.
“Different,” I say. “More feminine. Ladies don’t swear.”
“Merde,” she says. She’s not buying it, in any language.
I swear all the time, though my favorite swearword is not “shit,” it is “fuck.” Mick taught me how to cuss when I was nine or ten, but that is not one of the words he taught me. It is one I picked up out of necessity a few years later. I try not to say it around Phuong. I do have some manners.
“What are you going to do, Phuong?”
“Don’t know. Maybe will go away,” she says.
“What? Where?” I am alarmed. For me. I don’t want her to go anywhere. She is the only truly sane person I know in this town—besides my students, for whom I must keep up some sense of decorum, meaning I cannot go out drinking with them, and Tho. But I have learned it is not healthy to become too attached to the bartender.
“Not me, silly,” she says. “Nó.” Nó means It. I still don’t know what she’s saying. “Em bé,” she says, and smacks my forehead lightly with her fingertips for emphasis.
“Oh.” The baby. I get it; that part I get. Maybe it’s the beer, but I don’t know what else to say; not sure if she means what I think she means. I realize I don’t have any idea what can happen here, what’s legal or accepted. I don’t know either if Phuong is Catholic or Buddhist, animist or Cao Đài; if she has family in the delta or the highlands; if her father fought with the ARVN or the Vietcong or the Montagnards. I am just an interloper, still uninitiated and incurably dopey, traits Phuong patiently abides.
She straightens her back and casually taps her long, perfect, pink-shellacked fingernails on the sill like she’s playing a piano. “Maybe keep,” she says, as if it has just occurred to her, but I am not fooled.
“Does Ian know?”
She nods. “Knows. Not happy.” She hesitates, stops tapping. “Very,” she says.
“Very not happy? Or not very happy?” I ask, even though I’m not sure the distinction will be clear to her. As usual, she’s tracking me just fine.
“Not very happy,” she says. “But so-so happy.”
“Really?” I am shocked. I would not have expected him to be any kind of happy; he has always seemed so content, so immutably rooted in bachelorhood.
“Why surprise?”
“I don’t know. I just—”
“I know,” she says, and turns to me. “Nguoi My.” American. She leans her forehead into mine, locks eyes, kisses my cheek and floats swan-like away in her silky white áo dài to go back to work.
I get another semicold Tiger beer from Tho, watch the cyclos a bit longer as the rain lets up, and eventually return to the pool table, where I sometimes belong. It’s getting late, but I am not ready to go back to my place yet, out on Cách Mang Tháng Tám, Boulevard of the August Revolution, needing something closer to pure exhaustion to sleep in this heat, and the noise that almost never stops. I could probably go to the Rex and sleep with the Aussie, listen to his cherished CD collection on his fancy stereo in his hermetically sealed room, but the beers are closer—and warmer by a long shot. Besides, I hate just showing up; I like at least to be invited.
More people wander in—not regulars, tourists—trying, I would guess, to make some sense of this awkward and bewildering city they had surely envisioned differently. Maybe with real sidewalks, traffic signals that people actually abide, or white sand beaches and cabana boys, full-time electricity, food you can eat with impunity. I always say, Where the hell did they think they were going? But I didn’t have any idea either, so I guess that’s not entirely fair. I was, however, not expecting cabana boys or a Gray Line tour. I have been here six months now, and finally what is here is just what belongs. Meaning some part of me has acclimated, planted a little flag, and I can barely imagine—at least when I am awake—going back.
Last week one of the kids, hunkered down on the floor at the shelter, paused while scooping rice from his bowl to his mouth and looked up at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Where you town?”
At first, I always said California, as that is the place they have all heard about, seen pictures of, imagine America to be, if they imagine America at all. I haven’t tried yet to explain Montana—the perpetual expanse and frigid beauty of it. “Sài Gòn,” I said. “Nguoi Vietnam.”
He looked back down at his bowl, dismissing me. “Nói doi.” Liar. He finished the rice, picked the last grains out of the bowl with fingers that seemed to move independently of the rest of him. “Nguoi Canada.”
“Nope.” I shake my head. Not Canadian.
O dâu roi Where, then? “Say true.”
“Không bifit.” I don’t know.
“You crazy. Maybe American. American crazy. America number one.” He set his bowl down hard on the floor and left me then, without even a fleeting glance back, to wonder if I should even attempt to process either of his pronouncements, or any of mine.
• • •
Tonight my pool partner is Clive, of June’s, another ratty expat bar between here and the river, a few blocks away. He is another Brit, always barefoot, and, at fifty-something, fairly old as local gringos go. June is his Thai wife, a fading beauty, all business and hard as bone. Rumor has it that the taxi-girl trade at June’s is its main concern, not a sideline like it is here, and June the presumptive madam. Clive is also rumored to move a lot of drugs through the country by paying off the cops and the customs, and partnering with the right guys from Cholon, a less risky trade here so far than in Bangkok. Back in Manchester he worked the steel mills, and when they shut down went looking for something better than the dole.
“Shite work,” he told me the first time we talked. “Bollocks and shite not having any.”
“I imagine,” I said, though I couldn’t.
“Bloke I knew in Thailand sent me a postcard. Said the birds were everywhere. And easy. And it was warm. They had this thing called a sun.”
He found June in Chiang Mai, conducted a courtship of sorts, and married her in a little beachside ceremony.
“Was she one of the easy ones?”
He turned his head side to side two or three times, slowly, as far as it would go. “Nowt easy about her.”
“So why’d you marry her?”
He chalked up, bent down to take a couple of shots, and, after missing the last one, leaned back against the edge of the pool table, tossed his cue stick between his hands and looked up at the grotty ceiling. “The way she said no. Like she’d never been asked such a stupid question. I knew she was the girl for me.”
“What was the question?”
“I believe it was ‘Would you care to dance?’ ” He grasped the cue with both hands, waist-to-shoulder-width apart, and commenced a spin, his bare feet executing a remarkable pirouette.
“Your shot,” he said when he stopped revolving. “Though ya don’t have one.”
He was right. He’d snookered me good.
Clive seems to like me, despite my refusal to snooker him or our opponents when I don’t have a shot. It drove him crazy for a while, but now I get a little grudging respect for trying to hit something of my own, no matter how hopeless it may look or how many rails I’ll need to carom perfectly off of to get there. We are a good team, in any event, and win far more often than we lose. The taxi girls root for us, applaud when we pull out a victory in the final lap.
Tonight we are playing an American from Texas and a chubby Taiwanese businessman who are apparently involved in some sort of rare-monkey export concern that I don’t really care to think too much about. About what they do with the monkeys once they get them out of the country. The Chinese guy insists on yelping “Lucky!” every time I make a shot, no matter how simple or how complicated it might be, or how many shots I make in a row.
The Texan responds each time with a lively, drawled “Damn straight, podner.”
I would like more than anything to slap them both with one clean swipe.
Clive knows I go off my game when I let myself get rattled by the opposition. He keeps reminding me to focus on the table. “He’s blinkered, mate. And that Texas twat is just trying to wind you up. Ignore them.”
“I’m trying, but that is so fucking annoying. You notice they don’t do that to you.”
“Cor,” he says, “Flippin’ gormless. Keep your pecker up.”
“No pecker,” I say. “That’s the problem.” But I do get the gist.
“Shoot,” Clive says. I make two respectably difficult ones and then miss a dead-easy four ball in the side. Clive says, “Quit pissing around.”
“I made two.”
“My two,” he says.
Between shots, I lean sweaty and slick against the wall, and the temptation to unlock my knees, just give in and slide down to the floor, is almost overwhelming. In spite of the rain, it is at least ninety degrees in here, and the humidity might be even higher, if that’s even possible. I resist the inclination to perch on my haunches and instead focus on Clive’s feet as he pads around the table. No one has ever asked, at least within my earshot, why he never wears shoes, but I suspect it is because he can’t find any here that fit. His feet are not big, in the usual sense, but extremely wide. They look like hairless bear paws.
In the end we win on an amazing cutback Clive slices into the corner. He misses scratching by a centimeter. “Brave,” I say.
He pats me on the head. “No. Just good.”
“Another?”
“Not tonight, kiddo. I’m knackered. Going home to the missus.”
“Sounds lovely.” He just smiles and shuffles out barefoot into the dark.
It’s midnight, and the place is getting crowded, filling up with overflow from the Apocalypse. Phuong is delivering drinks, so there will be no window time before closing. Ian comes in, takes his usual place at a corner table, and nods at me. I nod back. I know I should get on my bicycle and go home, but the idea is too depressing. I don’t want to be lonely any night, but for some reason—maybe the twisted clarity of too many beers, or Phuong’s situation, or the music, or the rain, or my brother—I especially don’t want to be lonely this night. I wonder where James Taylor was when he wrote that song. Not Saigon, I bet. I bet it was someplace he knew and unquestionably belonged, and that he wasn’t even all that lonely.
Phuong takes Ian his beer, and I watch as he puts his hands around her tiny waist and pulls her close for a quick kiss when no one else is looking. I don’t count. I am a collaborator. And all of a sudden I want what they have, even if I don’t get to know exactly what it is, or even if I’ve been telling myself for years there is no future in it. I suspect it is something along the lines of love.
Phuong leaves for the bar and Ian waves me over to come sit with him. I am caught off guard by how grateful I feel but mostly am relieved to have at least a semilegitimate reason to stay awhile longer. On the way, I pick up a beer for him and a bottle of water for me. I already know I am going to feel like hell in the morning, but I don’t have to hammer in the last nail. Since tomorrow is Saturday, I have only one class—a sweet and ragtag band of earnest college students I will meet at the park in the afternoon—and then the eight-to-midnight shift at the shelter. I’ll survive.
Ian takes note of the water, my unfocused eyes, and says, “How many?”
“How many what?” I know what he’s asking but don’t want to admit to more than I have to right away.
“Sandwiches.”
“I was working on my second.”
“Thought better of that?”
“I did.”
A Tiger sandwich is three beers: one Tiger beer between two other Tiger beers. Two or more sandwiches is tilt. Not pretty. He gives me a thumbs-up. Which is nice. We try to guess the tourists’ nationalities and watch them flirt with the taxi girls. Eventually I go home.
Ian was one of the first people I met here, the night I found the Lotus, the first time I was brave enough to leave the one square block containing the eight-dollar-a-night hotel I stayed in for a few weeks after I landed. The block I had confined myself to, terrified of venturing any farther, of crossing the street. I had been in town only four days, but they had been long ones, spent mostly sleeping, dreaming of mountains and highways and home, fox dens and snow caves, waking to wonder what I had done. My room was enormous and timeworn; painted, with what looked like watercolor, a peeling and mottled blue: walls, floor, ceiling, doors, and window frames. The filmy curtains were also blue, and the holey mosquito net. It was like being underwater, and finally I had to get out, before I couldn’t anymore. In those four days I memorized the entry for “blue” in my dictionary. It said:
of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day: the clear blue sky / blue jeans / deep blue eyes.
(of a person’s skin) having or turning such a color, esp. with cold or breathing difficulties: The boy went blue, and I panicked.
(of a bird or other animal) having blue markings: a blue jay.
(of cats, foxes, or rabbits) having fur of a smoky gray color: the blue fox.
(physics) denoting one of three colors of quark.
It was Ian’s table that first Lotus night, and I watched him win for a long time before I had the nerve to put my name on the board. I was too unsteady to shoot well but made a few decent shots and earned myself a beer and some conversation, in English, which was a lot like being let out on my own recognizance. But after so much time and silence, it was hard to get used to talking again.
He asked what part of Canada I was from. Later I would find out the locals did that to avoid insulting anyone by guessing they were American. At the time, though, I just said no part, but close.
“Yank, then?”
“Yank.” I laughed. I’d never been called one of those before.
“What brings you to our fair city?”
“Curiosity, I guess.”
“You know about the cat, right?”
“What cat?” He waited for me to figure it out, which took me longer than it should have. “Oh, the curious one.”
“Right.”
“I do. We have that cat in America too.”
“Con mèo,” he said. My first Vietnamese lesson. I knew then that I could easily come to love a language in which the word for an animal was the sound it made.
He asked me how long I planned to stay, and I said I didn’t know. My ticket was open-ended and my purpose was clear as mud.
“Good luck with that,” he said, but not in a way that would make me feel ridiculous. More than, in some unnamable way, I already did.
After a few months I constructed something of a purpose: living, getting from place to place, not crashing my bicycle, teaching idioms and street slang, feeding feral orphans. A few months more, and Saigon’s incessant din and treacly grime and sleepless lunacy have taken me over. The city carries me along like a wave. Or an avalanche.
Which leaves little time to think about the reasons I came here: most of all to locate Mick, or his bones; or if not his actual bones, then his spirit, and anything else he could have left behind. Something I can see, or touch, or at least find a place in me that will accept this: MIA, after all these years, means gone, gone, gone, really gone. This will mean bucking up long enough to go to C? Chi—so close it is practically a suburb—getting down on all fours and crawling into the tunnels where the army mislaid my brother.
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for The Given World includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with authorMarian Palaia. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
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Introduction
In her riveting debut novel, Marian Palaia courageously explores love, loss, and survival, offering a candid and unforgettable look at what it means to be human. Unable to come to terms with the disappearance of her beloved brother in Vietnam, Riley leaves her home in Montana behind and sets out on a wild and uncertain journey to find peace. From San Francisco to Saigon, she mingles with a cast of tragic figures and misfits—people from all walks of life, bound by the unspeakable suffering they have endured and their fierce struggle to recover some of that which they have lost. Spanning more than twenty-five years, the coming-of-age story of one injured but indefatigable young woman explodes into a stunning portrait of a family, a generation, and a world rocked by war—and still haunted by it long after.
Topics for Discussion
1. Why does Riley leave her home in Montana? What informs the choices she makes about where she travels? Does she ultimately find what she is seeking in each place?
2. How do Riley’s parents respond to her departure and her long absence? Consider how the author uses shifts in point of view to reveal this information. Are the reactions of Riley’s parents expected? Surprising?
3. In the first chapter of the book, Riley says: “They say our early memories are really memories of what we think we remember—stories we tell ourselves—and as we grow older, we re-remember, and often get it wrong along the way. I’m willing to believe that, but I still trust some of my memories.” Is Riley a reliable narrator? How can we determine it? What does the novel seem to indicate about the nature of memory? Is memory a benefit or a curse?
4. Many works of literature depict the effects of war on soldiers, but The Given World offers a look at the effects of war on those left behind. Why might the author have chosen to focus on civilian life rather than on the soldiers? How are those civilians affected by the war? What commonalities are there in the effects of the war on the civilians and on the soldiers who have made it home?
5. The novel features a relatively large cast of characters. What common experiences or feelings do they seem to share? What message or messages does the book contain about common experience and what it means to be human?
6. How is redemption treated in the novel? What about faith, hope, forgiveness, reconciliation: do they contribute to redemption?
7. Many of the characters featured in the book are addicts. Discuss the author’s treatment of addiction and recovery.
8. Riley goes by many names within the story. She creates some of the names herself, but is also given various names and nicknames by others. Is the variety of her names related to the theme of identity?
9. Loss is a recurring motif within the novel. What examples of loss occur? Could any have been prevented? How do the characters left behind cope with it? How do they grieve? Do they find meaning or comfort in grieving?
10. The novel exposes various cultural prejudices based on race, gender, and sexual preference. Describe some examples. Do you think such prejudices have waned in the present era?
11. Many of the characters in the novel keep secrets and tell lies. What are some of the lies, and why do the characters choose not to tell the truth? Do any of the characters ultimately come clean? If so, how is the revelation received? What message or messages does the book ultimately offer on the subject of truth?
12. When Riley wanted to know the meaning of what she found in Frank’s books, Frank responded that “most of the time there was no single meaning; a lot depended on who was trying to figure it out, and what they brought with them to the show.” What did he mean? Do you agree with him? If so, what can it teach us about the way we read and interpret literature?
13. At the conclusion of the story, is Riley fulfilled? If not, is she left wanting? What does the conclusion ultimately indicate about her journey? What has she gained and lost as a result of the journey? Would you say her journey was worthwhile?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Compare The Given World to other novels you have read about the Vietnam War and postwar living. What do the stories have in common? How are the characters alike? Who are the narrators of the various stories, and what points of view are represented? How does The Given World stand out from or differ from the other works? Would you say that Marian Palaia offers a new view of war and conflict? Which storytelling styles seemed to you the most persuasive?
2. Have you ever left your country of origin and spent significant time in another? If so, did the experience change you? Did it alter your perspective of yourself or your life back home? Consider other examples of characters in literature who undertook a journey. Did they face obstacles? Were they transformed along the way? Did they return home? What is homecoming all about?
3. Use the novel as a starting point to explore the effects of the Vietnam War. How did the conflict affect the soldiers on both sides? What impact did it have on civilians? What effect did it have on the natural landscape of each country? How did it contribute to cultural and industrial changes in each country? How did the war affect the family unit or alter common ideas of love and faith? How have more recent conflicts affected the people and countries engaged in those conflicts? Do the effects differ?
A Conversation with Marian Palaia
Can you tell us about your inspiration for The Given World? What were the novel’s origins? How did you begin?
I wrote one chapter of the book (“Girl, Three Speeds, Pretty Good Brakes”) years ago as a standalone short story, about a girl in a gas station who was missing her brother and a good part of “whatever it is that centers us.” In 2010 I went back to school to get my MFA at Madison, and during the first semester, while working with Lorrie Moore, I wrote two more stories in which the girl of that first piece turned up again. Lorrie and I met, took a look at the three stories together, and decided it would be a novel. Well, she kind of decided—with my permission, of course—but I kind of went, “Oh, damn,” because the thought of writing a novel terrified me. I really had to fool myself into writing it by telling myself it was just a bunch of short stories about this particular character. Then, when it came time to align the thing as a “real” novel, the editing process was quite daunting, but it was work that felt really good and right, and I learned a massive amount about plot, structure, tension, arc, et cetera, from doing it. Plot had never been my strong suit, and still isn’t, but revising this book made me much more aware of the kinds of things you need in a narrative if you want people to keep reading.
What was interesting to you about the particular settings that you chose for the book? Why that particular time period, and those places?
I was a teenager in the 1970s, and Vietnam was very much on my radar. My parents were involved in the antiwar movement, and we lived in Washington, DC, at that time, so we went to the marches, we protested, we watched the war on TV. Years later, when I drove a newspaper truck for the San Francisco Chronicle, many of my carriers (aka paper boys) were Vietnamese, and I got to know them and their families, and some of their stories. That experience, along with having grown up during the war, led (in a not terribly direct fashion) to my moving to Saigon in the mid 1990s. Everyone thought I was crazy, but for whatever reason, I had to do it. It changed my life in a big way. Nothing I had imagined, good or bad, turned out to be true, and I spent enough time there for some things essential about the place to become ingrained in me. Which is not to say I really know Vietnam, or entirely understand its present or its history, but I got a much clearer picture of how much I did not know. Maybe writing The Given World was my way of trying to better understand something so totally ineffable. Aside from that, I have always been deeply affected, for whatever reason, by stories of the people damaged “collaterally” by war: soldiers on both sides, their families, their communities. I think if we ever had to admit to how many lives, generations even, are irrevocably damaged or destroyed by war, maybe we’d try harder to find a better way to settle our differences. Which, really, at the most human level, aren’t differences at all.
What made you decide to tell the story from Riley’s perspective—that is, from the point of view of a civilian and more particularly a young woman—rather than from anyone else’s?
Hers was just the first voice, the first life that came to me. In some ways she is very much like me in some of her experiences and outlook, and in other ways not at all. Without getting too much more specific, let’s just say I never stabbed anyone, or lived in my car for more than a few nights.
How did you conduct research for the novel? Were any historical texts particularly useful or enlightening, or did you rely more upon your own preexisting knowledge of the subject?
At my house in Montana I have an entire library of Vietnam books, both fiction and nonfiction. I have read them all, most of them more than once, and it is still so much to grasp: all the intricacies of the decisions, the mistakes that were made, how arrogant we were, how little we understood that the war we thought we were fighting was not the one the Vietnamese were fighting—and that’s why we pretty much got our asses handed to us and why all those people died or had their lives wrecked so unnecessarily. That being said, the book isn’t really about the war itself; but however much or little I do know about it informs everything Riley experiences, even as it stays so deeply in the background. I purposely kept it subtle, probably so subtle at times as to be completely undetectable.
Did you interview any veterans or other people who lived during the Vietnam War? If so, what struck you most about their accounts of postwar living?
The closest I came to interviewing anyone was talking with my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret and was based at Cu Chi, and who has not had the easiest time of it since coming home, but who is still, thankfully, here. Other than that, I have known quite a lot of people over the years who were either veterans of that war or relatives of the soldiers who fought it. In Vietnam I met and became friends with a lot of Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans during the war, including the mechanics who are now fixing bicycles on the sidewalks, and a photographer who worked with the AP and wound up in a reeducation camp afterward. What struck me most about all those people was how necessary it was for them to try to get on with their lives, despite how difficult it must have been. They seem to have turned that page, at least in regard to what they want to talk about, and they are busy living now and don’t have the luxury or the desire to revisit or revise history. As for being able to relate the stories of that generation and the impacts of the war and its aftermath, my oldest friends and I are that generation. That part is firsthand knowledge.
Are there any works of fiction about the Vietnam War and its aftermath—or about other wars—that you find particularly inspiring or important?
God, so many. The ones that immediately come to mind are Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien; Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places; Robert Olen Butler’s Good Scent From a Strange Mountain; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake; Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War; Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, and Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. Way too many more to name, but there is no leaving out The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. Such a perfect book. I love that one so much— I’ve probably read it a dozen times. The rest, maybe five or six or seven, only.
Excerpts of your novel have appeared online prior to the novel’s publication. How do you feel about their having a life independent of the book?
Since I began as a short-story writer, and since those pieces were more or less written as short stories, I am quite comfortable, and in fact I really love having them out there. It took me a while to get used to writing chapters that would not also pass as standalone stories, but those chapters, I think, do okay on their own.
On David Abram’s blog, The Quivering Pen, you said: “A collection of clever lines is not enough . . . it is only a starting place. I think many writers mistake it for a destination.” Can you speak more about that? What would you say is required of a good or successful work of fiction?
Wow. That’s kind of a huge question. I guess I could begin by reiterating that thought: it’s not enough to be clever, in your sentences or in your ideas. And it’s not enough to get from Point A to Point B, that is, simply telling a story. Writing is hard. One of the hardest parts is creating believable, complex, forgivable characters, but the really hard part is being completely emotionally honest. Ripping the scabs off. Uncovering your own heart and showing it to other people.
To which of the characters in your novel do you most relate—and why?
I guess that depends on what “relate” means, but Riley, for sure, a lot, because so many of her experiences mirror mine, but also Grace, the girl on the train—but maybe that’s not so surprising, since she is sort of a reflection of a younger Riley, by the time they meet. Funny, it was not deliberate, and until I went back for, like, the seventh revision, I didn’t see their similarities. The other characters I relate to in different ways, but every one of them was (and is) important to me, because a lot of them are the kinds of people who brought me up, more or less, when I first got to San Francisco. I was incredibly clueless, then, about so many things, and the people I learned the most from were the ones who had the least access to equilibrium and were the most scarred, inside or out, or both.
How has The Given World influenced your current writing projects or changed the way you write? Do you think you will revisit any of the characters or themes from this novel?
I am working on a new novel, and am much more deliberative about keeping the narrative cohesive, making sure all the pieces fit. I go back to the beginning a lot, to make sure the alignment is tight, and to make sure anything new I add is not random but actually belongs there. Nothing drives me crazier, when I am reading a book or a story, than to come to a part which feels as though the author woke up one morning, sat down at his or her desk, and said, “Oh, here’s an interesting thought I was having,” or “Here’s something unique I overheard; I think I’ll just throw it in,” or “Here’s this paragraph I’ve been saving, and I don’t have much to say today, so let’s just try to squeeze this in and hope no one notices it doesn’t belong.” I believe it is an author’s obligation to build a story, in the same way physical structures are built: you have to have a solid base, and each level (or chapter) has to be supported by what has gone before. Writing The Given World the way I wrote it, and having to go back to make sure that the structure was there, has taught me to stay on top of it all the way through. Going back to the beginning over and over means it will take me a very long time to write the first draft, but it also means less time (maybe) spent revising, even though revision is my favorite part of writing. So maybe going back to the beginning is actually a way to keep doing the part I like, and avoiding the hard part, which is creating new material. Who knows? As far as revisiting characters goes, Lu, or someone who is much like Lu, makes an appearance in the new book. She just kind of showed up, and I liked her, so I kept her. Themes? Oh, yeah. War and the wounded. Bad behavior and what underlies it. Wondering where, or what, home is. Loving the wrong people, or loving the right people the wrong way. Those will always be my themes.
Who are some of the storytellers who have influenced your work?
Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Malcolm Lowry, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, James Welch, Lorrie Moore, Barry Hannah, Louise Erdrich, Thomas McGuane, Jim Crumley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For memoir, Joan Didion, Mary Karr, Alexandra Fuller. For poetry, Richard Hugo, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirschfield. A million others in all camps.