The Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe is not a war novel. Instead, Rabe subtitles it "a novel about Vietnam”. This is true, since there are no scenes of combat described anywhere, at least not directly. It is a story about two individuals whose lives are directly impacted by the Vietnam War, trying to find refuge in human companionship. In principle, this is another casualties of war scenario, but Rabe creates something dark and beautiful through his use of prose and the rendering of his characters. His protagonists find each other really without looking for anything beyond a quick buck and a cheap lay, yet somehow immediately identify in each other the apparent loneliness which follows loss--of family, love, and innocence.The novel begins almost comically, with Private Joe Whitaker wandering aimlessly around an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC drunk and in search of meaningless sex as a last hurrah. Recently drafted, he doesn’t quite see the devastation of the war just yet. The opening chapter serves as a characterization of Private Whitaker, and the reader won’t see anything exceptional about this would-be soldier. We know that he feels strongly about a failed relationship and therefore, is capable of feeling something beyond lust. But he is introduced to the reader as young and superficial with regard to satisfying his own base needs. With this, however, his subtle transformation becomes all the more apparent as the novel moves along, particularly once he arrives in Vietnam and begins his days as a jeep mechanic, and eventually, when he meets Quach Ngoc Lan.Lan is a young, slight-figured Vietnamese woman whose father is dead and whose other family members are dispersed throughout the country. She works as a prostitute cutting deals with American GIs who get "boucoup" sex and their jeeps washed at the local car wash owned by the village brothel--a kind of full-service whorehouse. The tone shifts from the surreally comic to the more melancholy when the reader is introduced to Lan, who still dreams of a childhood lost and who goes about her life with quiet, even tragic resignation. What Rabe does brilliantly at the beginning and throughout the novel is evoke emotion and sympathy in the reader without being sentimental. He does this through prose that is both lyrical and matter-of-fact, describing serene landscapes and squalid interiors, allowing setting to reflect the interactions between, and the quiet despair within, his lonely characters: “She prowls the room, the dirt-stained tile of the floor. A gecko starts and stops. Her feet are small in her worn-out slippers, and reaching the front doorway, her eyes seek into the night, the road before her thudding with a huge green truck caked with wrinkled dust, loaded with crates. The sink and surge of the pavement comes through the earth to her feet.”Whitaker is surprised by the youth and prettiness of Lan, and even more so when she expresses interest in having him as one of her customers. Never forgetting that she is only a prostitute and nothing more, he will still feel something completely unexpected in her presence, which Rabe describes perfectly in the scene of their first encounter: “Whitaker, with Lan, who has come to stand beside him wearing white cotton pajamas, her long thick hair hanging loose, feels his prick stir and lust mixes with a funny fear and loneliness he does not understand. The silence, comprehensive as sleep, is strange, as if he has never heard a rural night before.” Not quite love but more than lust, Whitaker can hardly make sense of his thoughts and feelings, and it is precisely through this confusion that the reader sees that he has moved beyond what he was at the beginning. His “funny fear and loneliness” makes him more human, more soul than body, even though it is his search for carnal pleasures which brings him to this momentary realization of the senselessness of war and the contingency of loss: “Maybe now...he will be able to find himself, he thinks, somehow locating the lost part of himself that he knows is in there.”But to hope for Whitaker’s transformation to be genuine would be asking too much in the context of war, which tears away at human decency and human dignity. When Whitaker seeks Lan a second time, he finds her getting punched in the face by another GI--yet stands there and does nothing. Later feeling guilty for not having interceded, he perform a heroic act by saving her from two hostile Vietnamese soldiers. The scene is hardly described as a grand, benevolent gesture, though the reader is appeased to know that sympathy still exists. In the end, however, heroism, love, and friendship--what was once familiar seems tenuous, senseless and haphazard. These things have their moments, but the war pollutes them and robs them of their familiar goodness and meaning.The end of the novel, like the chance encounter between Lan and Whitaker, illustrates this randomness of life painfully and succinctly. It will disappoint readers who will perhaps wish to forget that life and death and love are all really a matter of chance. The language of The Girl by the Road at Night is poetic and moving, but the intent is not to romanticize war nor to obscure the brute ugliness it. Words are infused with the weight of tragedy and despair from page to page. The characters do what they can in a universe which is cruelly indifferent to the fate of all, an indifference only worsened by the ignorance and chaos which characterized this war for so many. ( )

Sometimes a review of a book is almost as good as the book. Consider this line from novelist Philip Caputo's review of this book in the NY Times "Rabe delivers the blow in a single paragraph that is a masterpiece of compression. It wounds like the swift thrust of a thin, razor-sharp dagger; you don’t realize you’ve been stabbed until you see the blood."

With a review like that, how could the book be bad?