A Dangerous Friend

Rating:
Summary: Evocative, powerful prose
Review: "A Dangerous Friend" is the second best novel of its type, but that is high praise indeed, since it is only edged out by Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." Just's prose is a joy to read. He was a first-rate journalist in his younger days, and it shows. His economy with words and syntax is a marvel. Not a word is wasted, not a sentence tortured. Beyond that, the story is gripping and poignant. Just, like Greene before him, re-creates Vietnam on the page in a way that makes it startlingly real. The characters not only fulfill their symbolic function but also engage the reader on a human level. Finally, this is the book that makes you really feel what America did in Vietnam, as the U.S. is clearly the "Dangerous Friend" of the title.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent novel of the early days of Vietnam
Review: A subtle, perfectly nuanced depiction of the early days of the Vietnam war. The tension of combat lingers through the book, but the bombings and firefights are largely kept to the background. What Ward Just creates is an authentic story of the civilians, soldiers and bureaucrats who laid the foundation for a war that would eventually become a catastrophic failure for the United States.

Just does an excellent job of showing the complexity of Vietnam; the bureaucrats vs the military, the new American imperialists vs the old French colonialists, nation-building vs firebombing.

The book centers around Sydney Parade, a sociologist sent to Vietnam to work with a somewhat mysterious government agency, the Llewellyn group, which is charged with collecting information and winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese though community projects. He is tasked with winning the cooperation of a French rubber planter and his American wife, relics of French colonialism who are living "between the lines" in an effort to avoid choosing sides and therefore becoming involved.

"We went to Vietnam because we wanted to." Explains the narrator. "We were not drafted. We were encouraged to volunteer and if our applications were denied, we applied again." Just captures the optimism, confusion, bureacracy, and overconfidence of America's early days in Vietnam, and we soon get a glimpse of the impending disillusionment.

Just covered the Vietnam war as a correspondent, and his first-hand familiarity with the conflict shows. An excellent novel.

Rating:
Summary: A poor imitation of greater works
Review: I got two things from this novel; That the author likes A) France, and B) Anonymity. The narrator never emerges, but chronicles the activities of the protagonist beautifully. And that's the crux of the problem. Greene's (IMHO much better) novel, The Quiet American, did not allow for neutrality or pacivity on the part of the characters, or the reader. Just's novel allows for a certain level of detatchment that does not fit. This novel never surfaces any issues in any way that makes the reader question what they'd have done differently. And this detatchment is far too safe for the subject matter.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite there
Review: I liked this book and liked seeing the civilian side of the war revealed. What a crock these people must have been about in the early days of the war. As an Army helicopter pilot, we viewed their efforts and flew them around on their missions to improve this country. Watching their seriousness and intrigue was amusing and quizical at best. We flew a lot of single ship missions in support of MACV and USAID; thank God our seriousness was about flying the Huey.
Read further about our side of the war with OUTLAWS IN VIETNAM; my book on flying UH-1D's out of Vinh Long in the Delta. Ward Just's book shows a very interesting story of what it must have been like to be French as this American involvement unfolds.

Rating:
Summary: Ward Just's best, and most timely, novel
Review: I loved this book! Ward Just's writing is, as usual, some of the best around (the first page is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I've ever read), and his topic couldn't be more timely: the slow but inextricable involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam, as seen through the eyes of a quasi-civilian, who has come to the country in 1965 as an idealistic "nation builder." As he becomes more deeply involved in his mission, he realizes that the country and its people are more complex than they first seemed - as is his purpose there. These realizations come late, and at some cost. The descriptions of Vietnam and its people are hypnotic and allegoric; I found myself enjoying the story on several levels. For every Ward Just fan, for anyone who wants to know what it was like to be an American in Vietnam in 1965, and for anyone who wants to know how our country's best intentions can turn into quagmires (a very timely question!) I highly recommend this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Well Constructed Story + Gifted Author = Quality Literature
Review: I rate this as one of the better novels I've read. It presents an interesting look at civilian/government involvement in Vietnam. Tension, intrigue, good and bad guys and lessons to be learned can all be found in this book.

A well constructed story presented by a gifted author elevates this book to literature class. Just has an elegant, simple way of writing that I found quite appealing. If you have any interest in the range of America's involvement in Vietnam or simply would enjoy a well written book and a good story, I'd recommend you give this book a look.

Rating:
Summary: Best Novel of 1999
Review: It's a shame that this novel wasn't a finalist for the National Book Award this year. It deserves the honor. A Dangerous Friend is utterly original in its portrait of the early years of American intervention in Vietnam. Ward Just perfectly captures the innocence, avarice, hubris, ignorance, and paranoia of the time. He liberates a genre that is, perhaps, exhausted, and at the very least, well-defined. A war novel without the physical violence (although there's plenty of the emotional kind), A Dangerous Friend captures the fine (sometimes irrelevent) distinctions between military and civilian, colonist and native, hero and villain. Simply, powerfully superb.

Rating:
Summary: Understated beauty
Review: The beauty of this novel is the understated way in which it is told.

I'd been meaning to read this book since it first came out last year and finally sat down with it over the weekend ... and couldn't put it down. In just a spare 256 pages, Ward Just recreates the fallen splendor of colonial Vietnam at the start of the conflict and examines the opposing philosophies of those caught in the gathering maelstrom - the American government presence there to provide "humanitarian" aid and support the rapidly diminishing infrastructure and the expatriate colonials who have lived there for years in relative calm and peace who are unwilling to give up what they call home for the sake of political interventionists who, they believe, have little relevance on their lives.

It's a delicate book but one that gives you pause to think. Ward Just is an verbal wizard at providing descriptions of climate and landscape. His characters are finely drawn and subtle (one might almost say understated) and the plot, while not particularly dramatic in the more traditional sense, evolves in such a way the reader knows something terrible is going to happen because the inevitability is there.

In some ways, this book reminded me of the French film done several years ago, "Indochine", with Catherine Deneuve. While the film is set in the 30's and chronicles the start of the Communist conflict in Vietnam, it portrays a similar crisis of conscience between the old established colonial point of view and the rapidly changing tides of modern history.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting look at America's early involvement in Vietna
Review: The characters in this little novel are types more than they are real people: the head of a quasi-governmental assistance agency; an idealistic American who comes to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese; an American who can't handle the freedoms and temptations of being away from home; an expatriate old-timer immersed in the country; and finally, and perhaps adding the most unusual touch, a plantation manager representing the shadowy presence of the French, who had long been in Vietnam, who would remain, and for whom America's war was just a brief disruption to business as usual.

Although all these carry with them their own attitudes and emotional baggage, they are seen too briefly and superficially to evoke emotion in the reader. Rather, the author uses them to give a general idea of the kind of people who propelled this early stage of America's involvement, when civilians were in control and programs were still gathering momentum.

The can-do attitude that America somehow will save Vietnam wears away rapidly from the main protagonist, the idealistic American through whose narration most of the action is seen, and who becomes indeed "a dangerous friend," not only to the French, but also ironically to the Vietnamese as well. His disillusionment is completed when, in a moment of betrayal, his agency, in order to demonstrate America's power to save Vietnam, must wreak destruction on it too.

That a Frenchman would risk certain retribution in such a setting to help an American runs counter to most notions, but author Ward Just, with his experience, must be assumed to know whereof he speaks. This is not a story of the armed conflict most readers associate with Vietnam, but a look at America's early, and even then awkward and misguided, intervention in a complex situation which it little understood and for which it was ill prepared. As such, this work is an interesting footnote to the literature on America's presence in Vietnam.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite there
Review: There were some interesting aspects to this book, most especially the decision by the author to focus on the early days of the Vietnam War--a topic not discussed nearly enough. That being said, I nonetheless felt that the characters and storyline were underdeveloped. He could have gone so much deeper with this. I never felt I fully understood the characters, that is the deeper complexities undoubtedly harbored being in such a unique situation. In fact, I could not believe it when I realized I had only 50 pages left to read. It seemed like the story was just beginning to develop.