UNPUBLISHED NOVEL SYNOPSES (dust jacket)
The Last of the Annamese
This novel chronicles the fall of Saigon. It tells of men and women who escaped,
those who found a way to go on living in the conquered country, and those who
chose death rather than life under the Communists. South Vietnamese Marine
Colonel Pham Ngoc Khanh prepares for defeat and death. Khanh’s estranged
wife, Tuyet seduces Chuck Griffin, a retired U.S. Marine officer, so that he
will arrange her escape and that of her son, Thu. But when Khanh is wounded,
she wavers. Khanh tells Chuck that rather than live under the Communists, he
will shoot his son, his wife, and then himself if they cannot escape. Tuyet
admits to Chuck she is pregnant. Persuaded that capitulation is imminent,
Chuck buys airline tickets for Tuyet and Thu to leave the country. The North
Vietnamese attack Saigon.
The Trion Syndrome
Aloof, obsessively self-reliant, and uncommonly strong, German professor Dave
Bell is persuaded he’s
Ungeminnt (he can neither love nor be loved).
He seeks fulfillment in achievement, which he sees as proof of dominance, and
casual sex. He’s haunted by a half-remembered clandestine mission in Vietnam
and the myth of Trion, the hypermasculine demigod who disemboweled his infant son
to demonstrate his ferocity. Friendless, Dave is betrayed by his colleagues and
accused of sexual harassment. He loses his job, his wife divorces him, his
children refuse to see him. As he prepares to run away, he remembers that in
Vietnam he killed a child with a knife to the belly. As he considers ending his
life the way Trion did—by drowning—the illegitimate son he’d
paid to have aborted, now a grown man, finds him.
No-Accounts
The first of seven AIDS patients I took care of was Jim. He was a chronic liar.
Nobody trusted him. Days before his death, unable to speak or walk, he put my
index finger between his teeth. I knew if he bit me, I’d get AIDS. I decided
to trust him and left my hand in his mouth. Tears filled his eyes. He opened his
mouth, took my hand in his, and kissed it.
The spirit of Jim lives in the character of Peter, a gay dancer, dying of AIDS, one
of the two protagonists in
No-Accounts. He thirsts for forgiveness for
infecting a young man who died. Martin, a straight college professor, is assigned
as his volunteer buddy. Martin grieves over the loss of his favorite student, dead
of AIDS. Together these two men face a disheartening visit to a gay bar, the
renunciation of Peter’s family, and the death of Peter’s friends.
Peter begs forgiveness from the mother of the man he infected and is rejected.
Martin tries to reconcile with his college-age daughter and fails. When they
discover that Peter infected Martin’s student, both men are forced to
rethink their life views.
No–Accounts is not about AIDS. It’s a story of two men, one
gay, one straight, who learn the essence of manhood from one another.
Continued ...
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