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Vietnam’s Legacy of Darkness and Hope

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The greatest pleasure for a book reviewer is to announce the appearance of a wonderful novel and become in the process a public benefactor bearing good news. Alfredo Vea is today’s news. But who is Vea? Readers of “La Maravilla” or “The Silver Cloud Cafe” need no introduction to his talent. For the rest of you, he is a defense lawyer who grew up as a farm worker and is becoming one of California’s best novelists.

“Gods Go Begging,” a meditation on the Vietnam War and on race, desire and urban gang wars, equals the passion and originality of his earlier work. But Vea goes beyond it in this depiction of a half-familiar, half-exotic world where horrific violence coexists with love and whimsy, just as Cajun spices and Vietnamese nuoc mam blend at the Amazon Luncheonette on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. Here, co-owners Persephone Flyer and Mai Adrong have been murdered, seemingly senseless homicides for which an illiterate African American youth, Calvin Thibault, has been arrested.

Calvin’s lawyer is Jesse Pasadoble, who met Persephone’s husband on a hill in Vietnam that they were defending against North Vietnamese attackers, including Mai’s husband. The husbands were lost in action and are presumed dead. But everyone who lived through that battle has turned up, including a chaplain who, driven mad by the war’s carnage, wandered into the jungle, became Mai’s unknowing lover in a Thai refugee camp, later awakened from his amnesia and went searching for his “flock,” homeless vets living under freeways.

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You’ve read this story before, of vets haunted by ‘Nam, and you worry that Vea might imbue this novel with the same magical, angelic realism that sometimes jostled uneasily with the Central Valley dirt-and-dance-hall realism in “The Silver Cloud Cafe.” But he doesn’t, and his rendering of the Vietnam War and its aftermath--from the viewpoint of black and Chicano grunts--is thoroughly original. The magic doesn’t disturb the realism; it enhances it, like the refrain to a song, a song about “all the boys on all the hills,” and the women who mourn them.

“Like many men who have witnessed the best and worst in themselves, who have been given a glimpse of the end of their own lives at a very young age, [Jesse] had lost the power to be lonely. That power had been replaced by something else: a soul sickness; a hunger for beauty, but only at a distance. He could not love his own life and the things within it,” including his would-be girlfriend, Carolina.

Unlike the homeless vets, Jesse can function on the surface. He’s a skilled and dedicated attorney, defending not only Calvin but also a grotesque white supremacist accused of child molestation, suppressing his repugnance in the interests of justice. With his friends, he can be funny and warm. But inside, he’s “flash frozen” by the war and may never be able to thaw out.

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“Gods Go Begging” is a tale of “those boys, [who] like the slaves from Africa, like the hopeless Indians, like true artists and the poor, had been chosen to bear the discomfort of their country, to bear the loss”--in a country that believes above all else in comfort and in winning. Vea, a true artist, speaks for them all. His storytelling is like the “supposings” of his soldiers between firefights--group fantasies of alternate worlds (and space probes) that tenuously shield them against the world. The hope and love “Gods” invokes doesn’t deny his characters’ despair but grows out of it, organic, inseparable.

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