|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Psychopathic Vet Serial Killer and Friends
| Article
# : |
14856 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
2,509 Words |
| Author
: |
John M. Del Vecchio
John M. Del Vecchio is the author of For the Sake of All
Living Things and The Thirteenth Valley. |
KOKO
Peter Straub
New York. E.P. Dutton, 1988
576 pp., $19.95
Pheew!
Welcome home, Brother! Welcome back to the World! Welcome to the world of strange, crazy, and pathetic Vietnam veterans entering a mid-life crisis.
I say "Pheeew!" because Koko is both captivating and tedious; because I'm glad it's over and yet the ending was engrossing and philosophical (though certainly not a thriller as billed).
This not a Vietnam story as in Roth's Sand in the Wind, Butler's Alleys of Eden, Mason's Chicken-hawk, Webb's Fields of Fire, or Moriss' War Story. Nor is it a veteran's story as Caputo's Indian Country, Heinemann's Paco's Story, or Hunter and Hunter's Living Dogs and Dead Lions. Koko glares into the psychic turmoil of posttraumatic stress, but it is not a personality/unit study a la Goldman and Fuller's Charlie Company. Nor does it reach the depth of Klein's payback. Koko tells us little about Vietnam or the American involvement there and only a bit more about the essence of being a Vietnam veteran in America or Southeast Asia in the 1980s.
Nancy Anisfield in Vietnam Anthology writes, "The literature of this confusing, shattering war must cover many things . . . the reactions of different types of personalities . . . [the] responsibility [of] each individual conscience… the influence [that] the culture and environment had on the outcome of the war, [and] the role of the media…And finally, this literature should seek an understanding of the changes in the national character."
What we are treated to in Peter Straub's Koko is a new level of that literature--a collateral or peripheral plot--a subgenre. Like many spin-off products, the subgenre exhibits the strengths and suffers the weaknesses of the main body--only diluted. Koko is a thriller with a Vietnam war atrocity as the psychic backdrop to a circular stalk-stalk plot that vividly takes the reader from Washington, D.C., to Singapore, from New York to Bangkok.
The thriller
Washington, Veteran's Day Weekend, 1982: Amid the throngs of veterans who have
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
