Lotusland (iv)
From novelist David Joiner
I read this morning that the author is revising this novel to release again in 2025. He wrote on his personal Facebook page that he has been off that social medium for 6 years.
I commented wow hey today I finish a fourth Viet Nam letter about Lotusland. David Joiner had not yet read any of my mad scribblings about his deliberately drafted and polished work.
He remarked in pleasant surprise that I am still reading the book so long after its first release in 2014. Hey, here in my head 9 years ago is breaking news.
I have taught a university course about homo sapiens from before speciation in the genus to the date of the final exam. I place my thought in the age of contact and nations, the past 4 hundred years.
My time depth for both the United States and Viet Nam are the 2 hundred years we share. I have a vivid sense of life since my grandparents whom I knew well were young in the Great War more than 1 hundred years ago.
I read at the speed of life, fast and slow by turns. I have just this week finished chapter Nineteen of David Joiner’s novel Lotusland.
That is 19 out of 29 chapters and 221 pages out of 329. By chapters or by pages close to 2/3. By my lights I have blazed along since I sat down with the novel at the end of August last year, 2022.
The note on the author at the back of the book says David spent 7 years writing it. So, he started in 2007 reading over what he had written that day and now in 2023 he is once more, twice more, who knows how many times more writing it again.
It seems to me that we work off the same clock. United States and Viet Nam time.
Hurtling forward with baggage. The novelist and I each arrived in-country the same year, 1994.
This week at Nineteen I am with David in a villa by West Lake in Ha Noi in 2006. I know the year because the author’s alter ego Nathan Monroe has remarked at the end of the previous chapter, Eighteen, that it is 12 years since the USA-led trade embargo on the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam ended.
Nathan was taking notes for an article about lacquer painting, what the woman with the pink hair he met on the first page of the book, on the Unification train, does for art. She has black hair now.
Nathan’s article appeared in the Los Angeles Times at the end of Eighteen. Then in Nineteen he opens a letter from the Asia bureau of Reuters asking him to write 1 about Agent Orange.
He is waiting with indifference while a Mr. and Mrs. Thompson inspect the villa for rental. Thompson is a timber man arrived in Viet Nam for the hard woods such as lacquer artists paint on.
He is 1 year older than me, 16 years old when the war between Ha Noi and Saigon ended. His sense of humor is like mine, like every American man our vintage who remembers age 5 through 15.
Our anger and sorrow of war are exotic to Nathan, worth remarking, before his time. He and his author are at least 10 years younger than me.
In 2006 Nathan still thinks that the war has nothing to do with him. Thompson joked tastelessly in the car on the way to the villa that people drive crazy in Ha Noi because so many got knocked on the head in that war.
There is something to that. Nathan’s driver waits outside the villa because there is a ghost in there.
There is also a family altar on the top floor, where the Thompson kids are exploring while the adults talk. Nathan sorts out its removal with competence, efficiently as indifferent to pleasing or displeasing his clients or his boss as he is to the ghost.
He is thinking about writing about Agent Orange. Nathan Monroe is David Joiner’s alter ego, an alternative 1 third of the triune self.
He is a much more distinct personality from his author than I expect in a first novel. But all those years being read and written over can build character and change a man.
Nathan has become the body and soul, the ears and eyes, of his creator. Everything that happens in the story takes place in Nathan’s awareness and presence.
It all happens at the speed of his life. There are no flashbacks, second stages, or separate lines of development.
Other people in the novel therefore are other people, in 1 world. An angry funny old Thompson bumps through, ancestors rattle around the attic where children play.
Our two young men Nathan and David previously wrote down what a woman says about Vietnamese art now together they imagine dioxin and its monsters while the driver waits outside by the car away from the ghost.
Viet Nam letters have addressed the novel Lotusland by David Joiner 3 times previously: first on August 27, 2022, second on August 29, 2022, and third on August 31, 2022.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.