Overview

John Mort's compelling first novel embodies both the Vietnam combat experience and the sad aftermath for those who underwent it. James Patrick ( Irish ) Donnelly flees the Missouri Ozarks with his life in shambles. His house has burned down, he's divorced, and he's estranged from his young son. On Florida's Gulf Coast, Irish joins a group of Vietnam veterans, one of whom reminds him of a soldier he knew in the jungles of Southeast Asia. That soldier is Norman Sims, an awkward, naive young Oklahoman, who shoots himself in the foot and becomes an object of ridicule. And yet only a few weeks later he leaps upon a machine gun in the middle of battle and saves his entire company. Norman's doomed love for a Vietnamese woman and his heroic acts (there are several) are a kind of inspiration out of the distant past, and Irish pulls himself together and returns to Missouri, prepared for fatherhood and a new midlife romance. The novel alternates between the stateside chapters after the war (containing Irish's past and present history) and the Vietnam chapters dramatizing the war, creating a tension back and forth in time as well as geography. We participate in the trauma of combat in crisp and authentic detail, and we witness the effect of that experience on Irish. Through his wry first person narrative we become acquainted with this bookish, reluctant soldier and his fellow infantrymen in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam and come to know him as the distanced, psychologically wounded narrator who slowly climbs back into a productive and satisfying life. Transcending any political focus, Soldier in Paradise dramatically renders the alienation of Vietnam veterans, ordinary men who've had an extra burden to bear because of the protracted, brutish character of an unpopular war that never came to a satisfactory end. Though this is a war novel, it is also a story of loveromantic, paternal, fraternaland of the power of memory and the healing power of putting one foot in front of the other to find a way to live in a seemingly meaningless world.

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9780870744402

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Reviews

A never exaggerated and always engaging first novel that explores the whole of a Vietnam GI's life, by Kirkus contributor and former Booklist editor Mort (the collections Tanks, 1987; The Walnut King, 1990, not reviewed). Nicknamed Irish by his fellow soldiers, James Patrick Donnelly comes from southern Missouri, where his boyhood life was poor, mean, and unenlightened, his father (who never once writes his son a card or letter the entire time he's in Vietnam) a bully who, after his wife dies of cancer and he loses his farm, takes up with another woman on the patently false pretense that he's going to marry her. Even so, this is the father who in one way or another continues to guide the son, even after the war, when, finding himself in psycho-emotional free-fall ( There were so many jobs I can't remember them all. Seventeen, was it, in twelve years? ), Irish heads for Florida ( When I was a boy, my father, tough old George Donnelly, would talk of Florida as though it were Paradise ). Irish's hapless involvements with women there, with other veterans, with one job after another, are offered up against the backdrop of those scenes in Vietnam itself that form the novel's backbone, unifying past and present. In Vietnam, Irish meets Norman Sims, the awkward and off-putting Oklahoma rube, patriot, fundamentalist - and instinctively courageous hero - who will eventually become Irish's alter ego and tragically lost brother. Before that stage of recognition can be reached, however, the reader will be taken through swamp, plain, paddy, and jungle with Irish's beleaguered platoon, through stages of death, suffering, horror, misery, irony, pathos, and humor that will finally allow the story to cohere, giving epiphany (especially through Sims's astonishing end) and the promise of wholeness to its thinking narrator's previously shaken and uncentered life. Intelligent, sensitive, and unflaggingly honest: a novel deserving of its place among the chronicles not only of that war but of its era. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

JOHN MORT served in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 as a radio operator with the 1st Cavalry Division. He received his MFA in writing from the University of Iowa in 1974 and his MLS in 1976. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 1992, he is a librarian, columnist, and reviewer whose previous books are the story collections Tanks (1987) and The Walnut King (1990). He lives in Missouri.

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