cover image All Souls' Day H

All Souls' Day H

Bill Morris. William Morrow & Company, $23 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-380-97453-5

Graham Greene's Quiet American and Eugene Burdick's Ugly American cast lengthening shadows over Morris's chronicle of two Americans abroad in Saigon and Bangkok in the months before the other assassination of November 1963--that of South Vietnam's prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, in a U.S.-countenanced coup. As in his previous historical novel, Motor City, Morris stacks his narrative with cameos by real-life figures: Marlon Brando, JFK and David Halberstam cross the pages, as does a barrage of cultural markers (everything from the lowly New York Mets to the Vietnamese Buddhist protests that climaxed in self-immolation). The problem is that his protagonists, Navy veteran Sam Malloy and U.S. Information Service employee Anne Sinclair, are simply too nice to be interesting. Having served as a Frogman in Laos, Sam wants to live as an expat in Bangkok, running a hotel and renting out a restored fleet of 1954 Buicks (the same vehicles that appeared in Motor City). But then he meets Anne, who's on leave from her USIS misinformation duties and experiencing a rapid disillusionment with the war and her agency's role in it. Together, they discover the military plot against Diem and thereafter attempt to maintain at least their portion of proverbial American virtue, if not innocence. Their intentions are at all times honorable, so there's never any suspense about the possibility that they will succumb to questionable behavior. Morris intends them to be foils for the moral confusion toward which America--in the midst of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the 1960s--is headed. But it's all a little too schematic and, in the end, the novel doesn't integrate itself into the American century as tellingly or as evocatively as Motor City did. (June)