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 come to this city for the welcome-home parade and dedication of the veteran's memorial brought about by great and passionate men like Jan Scruggs and Jack Wheeler are four of the most apathetic losers ever to hit the pages of a "Vietnam novel."
We meet: Harry Beevers (a play on words a la Pussy Galore--Hollywood will love it), the macho ex-platoon leader who is a flat caricature-mix of an Ugly American and a ridiculously poor, bumbling infantry lieutenant--it's not surprising his old platoon soldiers still refer to him as the Lost Boss (they also call him Beans, for undisclosed reasons); Michael Poole, the good guy, the rich baby doctor enduring the death throes of a perfectly boring marriage, a man so numbed by life that when his closest friend is killed he has no reaction at all; Conor Linklater, a down-and-out carpenter; and Tina Pumo (how he got this feminine name is of no importance),
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