In Country

A Vietnam vet returns to search for the heart of his darkness.

THE TIME IN BETWEEN

A Novel

By David Bergen

Random House. 237 pp. $23.95

Last month David Bergen won one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, the Giller Prize (worth about $34,000), for this profoundly sad novel, The Time In Between . Written in a tightly controlled monotone that strives constantly for dramatic effect, it depicts the far-reaching emotional damage suffered by a Vietnam vet and his family. Bergen's ability to dramatize trauma-induced disaffection is undeniable; whether readers will want to sink down that hole with his characters is less clear.

Haunted for 30 years by the atrocities he witnessed and committed, Charles Boatman leaves his remote home in the Pacific Northwest and returns to Vietnam in hopes of gaining some understanding of what happened to him as a young soldier. He's motivated -- to the extent he manages to generate any motivation in the grip of his stultifying depression -- by a North Vietnamese novel about the war that bears a striking similarity to his own experience in combat. After a few weeks of drifting about Danang, talking with local writers and artists and particularly an American missionary and his wife, Charles disappears.

Two of his adult children, Ada and Jon, fly to Vietnam to search for him by retracing his steps, speaking with the people he met and even reading the Vietnamese novel that moved him. In fact, Bergen has created a 15-page "excerpt" of that book and dropped it into The Time In Between in a daring bit of ventriloquism that provides the novel's most affecting scenes. This would have been more impressive, though, if the "excerpt" didn't sound so similar to Bergen's distinctive style, and, in any case, it has the unfortunate effect of making the rest of his novel seem even more motionless by comparison.

Once Charles disappears, the story turns completely to Ada's deeply troubled soul as she drifts around this foreign land, alternately assisted and annoyed by a 14-year-old huckster. Frequently abandoned by her brother and unable to wrest any information from the local authorities about her father, she slides between nostalgia and loneliness. The Vietnamese people she meets are kind but alien, given to orphic pronouncements that will do nothing to disturb the stalest Western clichs about those inscrutable Orientals. Ada realizes eventually -- long after we do -- that she will have no more success than her father in finding what she needs here.

Bergen conveys all this in severely austere prose that some will find haunting and luminous, but to me seemed passive-aggressive -- a narrative voice that insists on our attention by speaking too softly and refusing to provide almost any discernible forward momentum. Kent Haruf's Colorado novels risk that charge, too, but his work offers a kind of spiritual depth that accrues through one deceptively plain sentence after another. By contrast, The Time In Between begins with a heavy sense of dislocation and despair and lets it curdle for 230 pages.

Then there's the problem of the butterfly. Consider this typical scene in which Ada and her Vietnamese lover share big thoughts between dramatic silences:

"Vu lit a cigarette. He did not speak.