BookBrowse Reviews Dragonfish by Vu Tran

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A noir page-turner about lives lost and lives remade.

In many ways the desert sands of Las Vegas, with its flashy mirages of power and excess, is a perfect setting for the seamless execution of sleights of hand. It is in this city that Suzy, a Vietnamese immigrant who has seen the horrors of displacement up close, hopes to find a measure of peace and put some distance between herself and her past. Unfortunately, as she finds out, even the anonymity that Vegas affords is not enough to cauterize old wounds.

As Vu Tran's debut novel, Dragonfish, opens, Suzy (Vietnamese name, Hong) has disappeared from her Vegas home. Her husband, a local gangster called Sonny Nguyen, recruits Suzy's ex-husband, Robert Ruen, to track her down. It is Robert, a cop in Oakland, California, who narrates much of the story, reliving his years spent with a wife he barely knew, the memories of Suzy's abandonment of their marriage still raw. "For a long time I didn't mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the food, the sappy ballads on the tape player, her handful of 'friends' who with the exception of Happy hardly spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the gruesome crucifix and pictures of dead people she never talked about," Robert recalls. Yet there was a wall he could never pierce. Haunted by ghosts from her past and struggling for closure, she walks out of Robert's life only to try and make a fresh start of things with Sonny in Vegas.

As Sonny's men force Robert to travel to Vegas and help track Suzy, he tries to solve the mystery behind his ex-wife's disappearance, to piece together her story so he can achieve closure of his own. It is also in Vegas, in a new casino, that he meets Mai, Suzy's daughter that Robert had never heard of, but one that his ex-wife had apparently brought with her from Vietnam and eventually abandoned. Happy, Suzy's closest friend, also sheds some light on the enigmatic woman haunted by ghosts she cannot shake.

Most helpful however, is a series of letters that Suzy writes to Mai, and they punctuate Robert's own narrative in the novel. These missives add a dose of literary fiction to a noir suspense story, and Tran expertly melds the two tonally different sections to yield a powerful whole. It is through these letters that we see the horrors that Suzy has witnessed and the choices she was forced to make; they allow for us to understand why love for Suzy, with its attendant attachments, can sometimes be especially difficult to take root and grow.

The dragonfish, the endangered Asian arowana, is supposed to bring good luck, keep evil away, bring the family together, explains Sonny's son, Jonathan. Fond of dark places, it is a fitting metaphor for many of the morally complex characters in the story, even if, ironically, in Sin City, luck forever eludes them and evil lurks around every corner.

But these kinds of dark places are rich seams to be mined in fiction, Tran has said in an interview. It is in the shadows, the places where you rarely think to look, that the best stuff happens. The noir genre, in that sense, is just the right fit for Dragonfish. It suffuses the novel with an ample dose of ambiguity that can be suspenseful at times and frustrating at others. The enigmatic Suzy remains shrouded in mystery even at the end.

But that might be beside the point. "Some people you will never know beyond what they give you," Robert says about Suzy. "To be with them requires a bridge, an interpreter, and even then you're only ever approaching them as you would the horizon." You do realize that even in the land of reinvention, second acts are not easy to come by. "I finally realized that other lives are not possible," Suzy writes in one of her letters. That might not be enough of a closure for daughter Mai, or any of the other people who loved her, but it will have to do.

In all her moral complexities, Suzy is a boldly imagined protagonist, not easily likeable but deeply human just the same. That we learn about Suzy solely through memories pieced together by others and end up caring about her as deeply as we do, is testament to Tran's remarkable craftsmanship. By effortlessly moving a noir story beyond the confines of its genre, he proves he is a writer to watch.

Asian arowana, courtesy of Ginkgo100

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2015, and has been updated for the August 2016 edition. Click here to go to this issue.