Water in Darkness

“Just when you think it is safe to forget about the Vietnam War, something forces it back into consciousness. Perhaps it is former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey’s nightmare of having to relive, live on CNN, the horror of a night 30 years ago in the Mekong Delta. Perhaps it is a book like Daniel Buckman’s Water in Darkness.” —Los Angeles Times



“This book should carry an R-rating for violence, language and sexual situations, but unlike the average movie, it earns these elements by making them part of the bricks and mortar . . . Buckman’s novel is filled with sour truths about the ways men use race and ethnicity to erect barriers, walling themselves off from those who might otherwise grant them solace.” —Publishers Weekly

Water in Darkness is a taut, disturbing novel that examines the Vietnam War’s living legacy and plumbs the depths of human sadness. The book opens in the late 1980s in the last months of Jack Tyne’s enlistment in the US Army. Jack is a young soldier haunted by the death of his father at Hue City during Vietnam, and by childhood memories of watching his stepfather molest his sister. On the evening before his discharge from the Army, Jack covers his ears and hides in self-loathing while an effeminate soldier, also orphaned by Vietnam, takes a beating.



Jack ultimately returns home to Watega, Illinois and wanders among the ruins of steel mills long gone South, only to discover the same frustrated America which had forced his escape into the Army. He drifts north to Chicago and works as a day laborer, hoping to beat memory, evade conscience, and become invisible. There he meets Danny Morrison, a Vietnam veteran dismissed from the Chicago Police Department for cocaine abuse. This violent, dispossessed man, filled with his own strange lusts, becomes a surrogate father for Jack Tyne, quickly pulling him into the dark heart of our violent culture.



Heir to the impressionistic tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, Buckman uses psychological landscapes and terse dialogue to tell his story of the skeletons of Vietnam. Buckman’s America is a wasteland of depraved cities and drought-stricken cornfields where the moral high-ground afforded it after VE Day lingers like an ironic mirage—a place where there can be no illusions of innocence, only reminders that innocence is itself illusory.