Falling Through the Earth

Combining a love of lists with an effort to do more reading of serious literature, I took some Christmas money and purchased all ten of the books the New York Times Book Review section named as the ten best of 2006, five fiction, five non-fiction. First up is in the latter category, a memoir by Danielle Trussoni entitled Falling Through the Earth.

Trussoni grew up in LaCrosse, Wisconsin in the seventies and eighties. Her father was a Vietnam vet, a "tunnel rat," who came back emotionally damaged, his experiences there hovering over him like a dark cloud, and, by extension, this clouds her life as well. She, for reasons she probably can't precisely pin down, stuck by him, even after her parents' divorce, when her sister and brother went to live with her mother, but she stayed with her dad, even though he was frequently drunk and absent, which allowed her to become a juvenile delinquent.

Trussoni's childhood is contrasted with a trip to Vietnam she took in her early twenties to see where her father served, even going so far as to take a tour of a typical Viet Cong tunnel. As a young woman traveling alone in Ho Chi Minh City, it's a suspenseful travelogue, especially when she drops in such novelistic lines as, "I would remember the moment I bought it, thirty seconds before I came face-to-face with the man who made me wish I had not come to Vietnam."

Chapters alternate between childhood and travelogue. Her upbringing isn't unique, although picaresque, as half-siblings seem to pop up regularly, and it certainly isn't usual for a pre-pubescent girl to spend hours with her father at the local ginmill. Late in the book her sister describes the brood as belonging on The Jerry Springer Show, perhaps the ultimate insult a family can receive. When she describes latching onto her father and pushing away her mother she is quite effective, as well as those scenes when she realizes her father will never change.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this book as a whole. The writing is sensational, and I read it slowly, to savor each paragraph. But it wasn't a page-turner, despite the tricks such as I mentioned earlier, or ending one chapter with her brother being hit by a car and not resolving his condition until a few chapters later. Trussoni jumps around in time cinematically, and one can be forgiven for forgetting how old she is at certain points or what the state of the family is. Also, occasionally drops into the omniscient narrator mode to describe her father's experiences in country, which aren't nearly as effective, perhaps because she wasn't there. Finally, there isn't a big emotional pay-off at the end of the book, more like a serene coming of peace, which is good for her but not necessarily for a story.

I'm sure there's more to Trussoni's story, such as how a girl who ran wild hunkered down and ended up in graduate school, or, as her bio on the jacket tells us, how she came to live in Japan and Bulgaria. I'm sure that's for future volumes.