THE NAMES OF THE DEAD

The author of the prizewinning Snow Angels (1994) offers a clever reformulation of a frequently exhausted theme—a shell- shocked Vietnam vet finds that his real troubles begin long after he returns safely home. Larry Markham is one of those characters who could be said to have found their rut. A Cornell grad who went to Vietnam over his father's objections, he's settled back into daily life in Ithaca, where (more than ten years after his return from combat) he drives a delivery truck and volunteers as a therapist at the local VA hospital. Markham was a medic in Vietnam, and his obsession with the war and the lives he saw destroyed by it now stands as a barrier between him and anyone who didn't share his experience: His wife Vicki complains that ``It's like a religion with you. . . . You keep torturing yourself with it. That's what your group at the hospital's all about—keeping it fresh.'' Even when Vicki leaves Markham for another man, he doesn't seem able to make the connection between his inability to get over the war and his failure as a husband. Instead, he begins an affair with his wife's best friend—herself abandoned by her husband—whose mental instability has kept her as emotionally isolated as Markham himself. But before any resolution to his domestic turmoil appears, Markham finds himself threatened on another side—by a patient who becomes convinced that Markham's father was responsible for his mother's death and sets out to kill him and Markham both. The intricacy of the plot—most of the characters have some secret and usually malign link with others that only gradually becomes apparent—could easily have become far-fetched or predictable, but O'Nan orchestrates the proceedings well by providing a parallel narrative of Markham's experience in Vietnam and by refusing to settle all the questions in the end. A credible and moving account of moral failure and regeneration: thrilling, mature, and thoughtful.