Zero Tolerance - Hardcover

Richards, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374296626 ISBN 13: 9780374296629

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997

Synopsis

November 1973. The war in Vietnam is already lost. The United States decides to send the Bureau of Reclamation to build a dam on the Mekong River near a village called Da Trinh Sanh. The dam will divert the river from the rice basket of Asia, the Mekong Delta, and destroy the country. It is the biggest operation of the war and the largest public-works project ever. Twenty years later, four people are trying to put together what happened. Why did the dam fail? How close did they come to destroying Vietnam? They were all there, but they all remember different things. One was on a gunboat on the river, one was an engineer on the dam, one was a biologist in Saigon, one was a photographer in the field. None of them can quite tell the whole story.
Zero Tolerance is the story of their contact with the Bureau of Reclamation, which is not merely a government operation but an agency for turning America into a country of diverted rivers, a nation moving against nature itself. An inventive first novel about the psychology of obsession, in which the environment becomes an instrument of war and technology the most dangerous weapon of all, Zero Tolerance marks an astonishing debut.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Richards taught literature at Harvard for eight years.

Reviews

A complex conspiracy drives this fully imagined but very awkwardly structured first novel. At its center is the Bureau of Reclamation, a covert American engineering corps that sets out to flood Vietnam in postwar 1973 by constructing a dam designed to self-destruct. Set in the present, the novel is narrated by Gailly Harper, a writer who taps the memories of those who were involved in the project. Gailly is sought out by his brother, Jim, a talented engineer recruited by the ominous Bureau for the Vietnam dam. The Harpers have a history with rivers and dams: their mother believed she could converse with and control the Monongahela River in their Appalachian Pennsylvania hometown?a town ultimately flooded by the Bureau. Jim's friend Petard Davidson, a Digger Indian whose ancestral homeland was similarly destroyed, is a genius hydraulics engineer who hates the Bureau projects on which he works. An expert at sabotaging his own creations before they can destroy the environment, he reverses field in Vietnam, secretly making the dams work so that the devastating flooding never occurs. This is both a technically detailed thriller and an overwrought literary novel. The omnipotent Bureau (whose existence predates that of the U.S.) would be right at home in the paranoid imagination of Thomas Pynchon, to whom the book owes a spiritual debt and from whom Richards could still learn much about spicing earnest soapboxing with the pleasures of comedy. The central theme?that the human mania for manipulating the environment is easily corrupted?is a powerful one. But it's a one-note point that, in Richards's densely elliptical storytelling, is distractingly convoluted.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In sinuous, murky first fiction from ex-Harvard lit prof Richards (Imperial Archive, etc., not reviewed), the memory of Vietnam continues to plague the lives of four people who were involved in the failure, in 1973, of a massive dam built to control the mighty Mekong River. Thinking his brother, an outsider, can unravel the tangled threads of their stories, Harper, one of the four, persuades the emphatic Gailly to listen. Complex memories of other rivers and dams color each person's Vietnam connection: Harper's memories have to do with an idyllic riverside life that ended when the Monongahela was dammed, flooding his Pennsylvania home. He eventually became the commander of an armada of gunboats, patrolling the Mekong on the day the dam went into service. Petard, an American Indian and the project's chief engineer, who saved Harper's life, first became obsessed with dams when his tribe was displaced by one on the Klamath River; revenge drives him to engineering school and a career with the Bureau of Reclamation, where he quietly works to sabotage projects. Travers, a brilliant Harvard entomologist whose ideas of insect behavior fueled the Bureau's decision to dam the Mekong, finds his opposition to the dam shaped by the ancestral memories of a female Puritan forebear whose heretical notions of altruism he has unwittingly embraced. And photographer Jenna, whose images of the dam showed deep cracks where none were otherwise visible, had her feelings shaped by contact with the French dam builder Defosse, who believed that ritual human sacrifice was required to preserve a dam. Not until Gailly gets the skinny from the Bureau's director, however, can he make sense of the mix of anger, obsession, and arrogance that contributed to the dam's catastrophic failure. Often reminiscent of an exercise in multidimensional puzzle- solving, Richards's fiction debut is as alluring as it is mind- bending. Too bad that in the end the revelations accumulated here, like the imaginary dam that brought them together, fail to hold water. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

That "the Bureau [of Reclamation] doesn't map what it sees, it maps what it wants to see," is the theme of Richards' first novel. It is a book of ideas about imposing our human design upon nature and the consequences of such arrogance. The story is about four men who were involved in a project during the ending days of the Vietnam War. This Bureau of Reclamation project was to create a mighty dam on the Mekong River, which would have a cataclysmic impact upon the highest population region in that country: a "nuclear bomb" without the fallout. The dam failed. This novel does more than merely investigate why; it probes the larger issue of the limits of humanity and the integrity of nature. The prose is light on description (fuzzy sense of place) and character development but strong on presenting a timely message on the limits of civilization. Michael Boylan

This engrossing debut novel describes a highly organized undercover operation during the Vietnam War to destroy the fertile rice fields around the Mekong Delta. The lives of four characters intertwine in a series of events that mix feats of engineering and magic. The narrator learns that the motives and the sabotage of the dams were known to the Bureau of Reclamation, which used this information to further its own ends. In a twisted turn of events, selected dams are sabotaged while a planned system of secondary dams is spared, preventing the famine predicted to follow the war. Richards effectively contrasts the central role that rivers play in Vietnamese life with Americans who lived in close alliance with rivers before the extensive construction of dams. As the narrator's mother comments, "The river takes back what the river gives...everything is a return to the river." Rich in metaphor, this novel offers a glimpse of river culture, flourishing in other countries but sadly removed from our national experience. Highly recommended for all collections.?David A. Berona, Westbrook Coll. Lib., Portland, Me.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374296626
• ISBN 13: 9780374296629
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245