Book Review: 'Message from Nam' by Danielle Steel

(C) 1990 Dell Books

Question: What do readers get when a romance novelist - Danielle Steel - attempts to push the literary envelope and creates a love story set in Vietnam-era America?

Answer: Depending on one's particular tastes and sensibilities, either (a) a fascinating literary break from Steel's norm (glitzy love stories set in the world of the rich and famous) and a crowd-pleasing tearjerker/historical novel or, (b) a well-meant but vacuous exercise in fluff which awkwardly crams every tragic event in American history into a standard-issue "awakening of consciousness" story involving a Steel heroine who finds true love in the middle of a chaotic decade.

1990's Message from Nam represents Steel's first stab at trying to break out of her Problems Faced By Very Wealthy People in Life and Love mold and respectability as a more well-rounded writer of fiction. 

As a writer aiming for a larger audience, Steel apparently figured that in the post-Platoon boom of novels, movies and non-fiction books about the Vietnam War, setting a romance novel in that time period would give her literary respectability.

The novel, which is introduced by a rather overwrought poem titled "The Boys Who Fought in Nam,"  centers on the personal and professional travails of Paxton (Pax) Andrews, who is introduced as a 16-year-old Southern Belle to Be from Savannah on November 22, 1963, the first of many sad historical dates Steel shoves into the plot. As usual in a novel of the genre, Pax is unusually bright and independently-minded, and she resists her wealthy and traditionally Old South family's desires for her to be a well-bred, well-read but typical old-money Georgia housewife, with none of that liberal nonsense about supporting civil rights or not going along with JFK's call of not asking what her country can do for her, but what she can do for her country.

Pax decides that the plans made for her by her parents don't suit her, so when she graduates from high school she goes off to UC-Berkeley and majors in journalism.

While there. she meets and falls in love with Peter Wilson, a law student at Berkeley whose dad, by the way, is a wealthy newspaper publisher.  Pax and Peter hook up, of course, and eventually the two become radicalized by the burgeoning antiwar movement, even going as far as joining protests and draft card-burning ceremonies.

Despite this, Peter is inducted into the Army, sent off to basic training, and shipped off to Vietnam, ostensibly for the one-year tour of duty required of every GI sent to Southeast Asia.  

However, his stay in Vietnam is not a long one; shortly after arriving "in country" Private Peter Wilson becomes one of the nearly 60,000 Americans killed in the hopeless "lost crusade" in Southeast Asia.

Grief-stricken (1968 being also the year of the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations), Pax scores a job with a San Francisco newspaper as a "roving correspondent" assigned to cover the Vietnam War so the American people can learn what their boys are doing...which is fighting and dying in miserable jungles, rice paddies and firebases, not knowing who the enemy is at times.

Mentored by veteran Associated Press reporter Ralph Johnson, an old hand at covering Vietnam (or, as Steel writes it, Viet Nam), Pax begins writing a regular column which will chronicle the war and the soldiers she meets over the next seven years.  

And of course, she'll fall in love again...several times, in fact, as first one officer boyfriend is killed and an enlisted follow-on love goes missing in action

Steel apparently did a great deal of research on Vietnam and the era, and perhaps she even dug into her own memories from the period.  There are tons of references to political figures, movies, fashions and social attitudes of the 1960s mixed into the love found-love lost-love rediscovered plot of Message from Nam.The problem with the novel is twofold.  First, Steel is infamous for her habit of using too much concrete detail to show, rather than tell, her story.  Her idea of telling us how  Pax writes letters to her father as if he were away on a trip but not sending them as a way of venting her frustrations is interesting, but Steel's description takes up most of a page in the 1990 hardcover edition.  Most of the exposition is done in this fashion, which gives readers unfamiliar with Steel's novels a bit of sensory overload at best, alienates them at worst.

Second, though Steel probably didn't consciously intend to do so, by choosing the Vietnam War as a literary setting for a somewhat cliche-ridden novel, she comes across as wanting to cash in on the whole Platoon-inspired "Vietnam Awareness" cultural fad of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Worse, she trivializes it by reducing it to a cross between Erich Segal's Love Story and Michael Herr's Dispatches, with all the literary shallowness of the former and little of the surrealism and honesty of the latter.