Opening Passage:
New Orleans is at war. The long howl in the sky; what else can it mean?
Hương drops the dishes into the sink and grabs the baby before he starts crying. She begins running toward the door -- but then remembers: this time, another son. She forgets his name temporarily, the howl is so loud. What's important is to find him. (p. 3)
Summary: Hương's husband Công was a professor in Vietnam; he got into trouble with the Communists, and as a result, he arranged for Hương and his children to go to America in 1979, where they settle in New Orleans. Hương herself spends a long time expecting her husband to follow, writing him regularly; but in fact he refuses to leave Vietnam and eventually remarries. Starting out from almost nothing, Hương attempts to raise her sons, Tuấn and Bình (usually known as Ben). Tuấn attempts to maintain his Vietnamese identity, getting involved in a Vietnamese gang for a while; Ben takes the route of assimilation, going to college and eventually moving to France.
The title seems to involve a play on words in Vietnamese; nước is the word you use when speaking about a country but literally means 'water' or any water-like liquid. If you are asking a man about your age what country he comes from, you say something like, Anh đến từ nước nào?, which literally means, What waters are you from? Leaving nước Việt Nam and coming to nước Mỹ (America), the family has lost a lot -- a husband and father, most notably, but along with him a lot of their Vietnamese roots, and the story explores their different ways of trying to remedy this lost. This works better with Hương and Tuấn than with Ben, I think. I don't know if it is intentional, but in all of his relationships Ben sends up red flags; he is the sort of person who is superficially nice, but uses his people for dealing with his own psychological issues. The way he's handled, I am again not sure whether it was deliberate to represent him as such, but in real life a Ben would be a nice neighbor but not someone you would want to be involved with. He goes to France to deal with his lack of a father (something he himself admits) and falls in with a strong masculine figure, Michel, with whom he has an affair, which is flag one; Michel is a Communist, which is flag two; and despite the fact that it is supposed to be a passionate affair and Ben early on even thinks of it as love, the strongest evaluation he ever gives Michel is that he is kind and has grand ideas, which is flag three. Kindness is important, but if that's the best you can say about your sexual partner, that's not actually a good sign. All of this is just an example of why Ben is the most exasperating character, and heading for disaster -- for others if not himself -- but this line is not followed and, as I said, I don't know if it was ever intended. The tale is disrupted by another disaster, in which Hurrican Katrina hits New Orleans, and the family now has to face building yet again, having yet again lost things to the water.
The book is a nice, smooth read; it stays enjoyable all the way through, despite the fact that it sometimes deals with characters who are not themselves completely pleasant. It does not entirely avoid the stink of writing workshop. Every so often it flattens to the sort of technically competent but committee-bland style that infects works of a certain kind, handling a scene or description in exactly the way a thousand other books do, using exactly the same techniques to do it. Like many modern works written in the same general environment, it overemphasizes character arc, sometimes passing quickly over genuinely interesting parts of the story in order to do so. It also has the odd romanticizing of a particular type of literary culture that reminded me of the old joke that literary fiction is fiction written about the kinds of people who write literary fiction. Nonetheless, these weaknesses are not front and center; this is a book of a clear and interesting idea handled well and interestingly.
Favorite Passage:
He rummaged through the pockets of his suitcase until he found it and ran outside, feeling the small metal chain jingle in his hand. When he opened the screen door and let it swing closed behinid him, he found his brother wasn't there anymore. The bike leaned agains thte house and next to its front wheel sat an envelope. Tuấn looked out into the streets and there was nothing. The night was silent. No cars, no people, no animals, no Ben. Ben was gone. Ben disappeared. Like he wasn't even there, like he never was. Not at race. He was so much like his father. (p. 242)
Recommendation: Recommended; it's neither long nor difficult, but makes for an enjoyable short read.
*****
Eric Nguyen, Things We Lost to the Water, Alfred A. Knopf (New York: 2021).