I have been a poor man living in a rich man's house
and I have gone back to the mountains and for one woman
I have worn the fur of a wolf and the shepherds' dogs
have run me to earth and I have been left for dead
-- W. S. Merwin, "Peire Vidal"
Where do you go at night?
This is the question the teenage orphans ask each other. So they go to Paris. To the moon. To the desert. To a "very large ship." Or "someplace where there is a working fireplace ... a very large fireplace."
So, huddling together "young animals in a den," they watch the stars -- two stars -- and clouds through the hole torn in the ceiling of the Tobacco Captain's farmhouse. The Tobacco Captain was French, a World War II veteran who had gotten rich off the tobacco fields that no longer existed around the property. He was debauched, a drunk and an art lover. There are still canvases on the walls, though members of the hospital staff occasionally cut a painting from its frame and roll it up, imagining that, someday, somewhere far from the farmhouse, they might be worth something.
The farmhouse now serves as a makeshift hospital, with cots for the moaning wounded and the dying, those who have had their legs blown off by cluster bombs. Alisak, in the old life, was a neighbor to Prany and Noi, brother and sister. Now, they are kind of a family, in Laos in 1969, in the Valley of Jars -- home to thousands of mysterious urns carved for unknown reasons during the Iron Age -- riding motorbikes on dangerous missions for Vang, the doctor while a superpower from the other side of the world drops bombs on them.
This despite the U.S. being the ostensive ally of Laotian royal government. But insurgent communists, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese move relatively unimpeded through the countryside so rural folk -- many of whom don't "know the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist" but "just wanted to survive" -- are caught in the crossfire, with the Americans regularly dropping their bombs.
Not all of which explode on impact, some burrow into the earth and wait, lethal potentialities waiting for their moment.
Meanwhile, Vang plays piano and teaches them a little French, a little English, preparing them for the time that they will go away for real. And all of them will go away, they will be flung far from the farmhouse, where, years later, Alisak will be ashamed to admit that he was happy.
At the end of the first section, the orphans and Vang evacuate the hospital ahead of another American airstrike. Helicopters will take them and the patients away, exactly where no one knows though the rumors say Thailand. Or France. Prany and Noi hope for France, where they have "French cigarettes and wine and bread and the Seine."
From its first sentence, Paul Yoon's Run Me to Earth (Simon & Schuster, $26) announces itself as a quiet book about extreme things, about children who grow up amid normalized violence. (It takes its title from a line in W.S. Merwin's poem cited above; Peire Vidal was a 12th-century troubadour known for his love songs, 45 of which have survived to modern times.) Over about 250 pages, Yoon measures out the lives of the orphans, in a precise and restrained voice that delivers horrors in calm cadences and is all the more effective for avoiding overstatement and hyperbole.
This is not a war novel in the manner of Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried. If it has a ready precedent it may be Louis Malle's autobiographical film Au revoir les enfants, though Yoon was born 11 years after the events he describes in the book's opening section, which has the authority of a literary memoir.
After that magnificent opening section, the novel pushes forward to 1974 and 1977, before falling back to 1969 and then finally jumping forward to 1994 and 2018. It expands beyond the Valley of Jars to France, Spain and New York. There's a cinematic quality to the structure, as events are considered first from one character's perspective and then another's. Two characters alluded to in the first section -- Auntie and Khit -- take up the narrative at various points. As in life, we can only know what we are told and what we can surmise, but Yoon keeps faith by telling us what becomes of Alisak, Noi, Prany and Vang.
Run Me to Earth is a compact historical epic that reads like poetry but with a satisfying concreteness to the imagery. There's nothing elliptical about the violent history Yoon traces, and nothing dreamy about the reckonings his characters endure. Yet while Run Me to Earth is not a sentimental book, it, like life itself, is not entirely drained of hope.
Email:
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Style on 02/02/2020