Books in Brief: Stringer

Stringer, by Ward Just (Atlantic/Little, Brown, 199 pp., $5.95). A beautifully written but maddeningly obscure novel— allegorical, sentences loaded with symbols planted as carefully as antipersonnel mines, a deceptively simple plot that moves from apparent reality through insanity into what seems to be an updated version of Sartre’s existentialist hell. Stringer (the name itself is symbolic), an intelligence agent operating in an unnamed Asian country, plants sensors along an unnamed trail down which unidentified troops in black pajamas periodically come padding. The sensors guide in an air strike which demolishes a convoy. Stringer’s partner is killed by a convoy survivor, Stringer escapes, and precisely two-thirds of the way through the novel he is blasted into insanity and/or death. The last third of the novel is set in a nameless capital where Stringer, captured, tries to make sense of his senseless past. The capital may be a real place. Or it may be hell. Or, God forbid, it may be heaven. But that’s the problem with Stringer. You can interpret it any way you want. It will be read as a novel about Vietnam, especially since Just was Washington Post correspondent there for 18 months. But Just, born like Stringer in 1935, seems most interested in explaining not the war itself, but rather how his generation viewed itself in relation to that war, a job he could do more effectively by writing about his own journalistic experiences.

JR

About the Author

John R. Coyne Jr.

Featured Tags

Stringer, by Ward Just (Atlantic/Little, Brown, 199 pp., $5.95). A beautifully written but maddeningly obscure novel— allegorical, sentences loaded with symbols planted as carefully as antipersonnel mines, a deceptively simple plot that moves from apparent reality through insanity into what seems to be an updated version of Sartre’s existentialist hell. Stringer (the name itself is symbolic), an intelligence agent operating in an unnamed Asian country, plants sensors along an unnamed trail down which unidentified troops in black pajamas periodically come padding. The sensors guide in an air strike which demolishes a convoy. Stringer’s partner is killed by a convoy survivor, Stringer escapes, and precisely two-thirds of the way through the novel he is blasted into insanity and/or death. The last third of the novel is set in a nameless capital where Stringer, captured, tries to make sense of his senseless past. The capital may be a real place. Or it may be hell. Or, God forbid, it may be heaven. But that’s the problem with Stringer. You can interpret it any way you want. It will be read as a novel about Vietnam, especially since Just was Washington Post correspondent there for 18 months. But Just, born like Stringer in 1935, seems most interested in explaining not the war itself, but rather how his generation viewed itself in relation to that war, a job he could do more effectively by writing about his own journalistic experiences.