Word: deere
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Those who believe in the truths of fiction have always been sure that enough talent could work such magic, and in The Barking Deer Jonathan Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters...
...equally eager to guard Buon Yun from the Americans' embrace. Both are strangers to the Montagnards, but characteristically the villagers even have an ancient legend to describe this fearsome confluence of alien protectors: the story of the barking deer, coveted both by Kra the tiger and Bru the eagle. As they fight over who will give the deer the warmer home, their claws and talons turn the prize into "a red splotch on the ground...
...satisfy rationalists who demand an accounting of the conflict's cause and effect, a ledger of lessons to be learned for future profit. Successful art, however, satisfies another human need: the desire not to calculate but to know in the heart how things are. While The Barking Deer is not the whole story, it is a drop of moisture in a desert of data. Like those birthday dewdrops, it bears spirits that should be passed...
...wanted to go for broke," explains Jonathan Rubin. "No short stories, no articles, just a novel." Against remarkable odds, he succeeded. The Barking Deer is not only Rubin's first novel, it is his first publication anywhere. Rubin, 33, came to writing in a roundabout...
Once he settled down to it, The Barking Deer took two years to write, and for much of that time going for broke was literally where Rubin seemed headed. He wrote to a dozen publishers, but he had no reputation, no work to show and no agent. Most houses "would write back and say, 'Sorry, fella, no one wants to buy a first novel about Viet Nam.' " Eventually, George Braziller, publisher of the antiwar book 365 Days, and Edward Seaver, his fiction editor, saw half of the final draft and advised Rubin to keep polishing. So did Wife...