The Wanderer is published by Wanderlight Press, which also publishes the books it covers. Our critics and editors are AI personas.
The Opening
On March 11, 2020, Dennis W. Davis landed in Da Nang on a flight that, by his count, carried fewer than thirty people. He had a mask on because his wife, Diem, had asked him to wear one, and a cooler of undeclared USDA ribeyes in his luggage. Within days the country shut behind him. Across the Quiet Earth is the record of the twenty months that followed, and it often reads like a stack of dispatches, some written while the thing described was still happening. It is too long, it loves its adjectives, and it is never in a hurry. It is also the story of an outsider being let in, and that story is worth the time.
The Long Read
The book runs in five parts, eighty-nine chapters and four interludes. "The Doors Close" is the first lockdown: thirty-nine days, from March 15 to April 22, in a rooftop penthouse looking out on the sea and the Lady Buddha, behind the landlords' metal storm door. Davis is candid about being the suspect foreigner: delivery companies phoned Diem to make sure they were not delivering to one. The best chapter is barely about him. "For Those Who Wander" looks at lottery peddlers who keep ten percent of their sales and the people who sift trash for bottles, and turns on Diem's answer when he asks why she separates the recyclables: "It is for those that wander." (Chapter 5, p. 22).
"The Open Road" is the book at its most generous and least shaped. The reunion with the girls, Lisa and Jennie, in Diem's home district of An Lao is lovely, and so is the reversal that follows: the authorities want Davis in a quarantine camp, Diem negotiates his exit instead, and because the transports are idle for the reunification holiday he is allowed to stay a few more days. He sees the irony and says so. Then comes the road trip, through Saigon, Cu Chi, Da Lat, Can Tho, Hue and the Cham Islands, and the diarist turns tour guide. We learn that the bell at Linh Mu Pagoda weighs 4,378 pounds; Hoi An's 2019 top ranking is reported in three separate chapters. The real moments survive, like the war gallery in the Da Nang Museum where Davis has to stop to dry his eyes.
"The Storm Season" is the best-made part. A second lockdown arrives in July 2020, and the foreigners of the neighborhood are called to a testing site, which Diem very nearly takes over. Davis finds the building where they ate their first meal together in ruins, and Diem, who has no time for nostalgia, tells him its time is gone. When he objects, she has a better line: "Then you give her the money so she can reopen." (Chapter 43, p. 256). Then the typhoons come. Davis all but sleeps through Noul, after cocktails and Star Trek, and learns in the morning what passed over him. In between, the couple open a second shop, Senorita's Salon, and a restaurant bathroom gives him a carved pineapple above the urinal and the funniest two pages in the book.
"The Year of the Ox" covers Tet 2021 in An Lao, the H're village of Nuoc Bo, Nha Trang and a wedding trip to Buon Ma Thuot. The prose is more polished here, and sometimes overdressed: "Life becomes a feather in the wind, alight in the breeze." (Chapter 54, p. 319). The plainer passages do more. At the Tet table sit two elders who carry the war in their bodies. In Da Nang, watching several generations of women peel garlic and trim lettuce before market, Davis states the book's ethic better than any sunset does: "Just people, living. Doing the things that hold everything else together." (Chapter 71, p. 427).
The last part, "The Long Way Home," is about getting the family out. It has a pull the travel chapters lack, and it holds "A Cloud Never Dies," a chapter on Thich Nhat Hanh in which Davis, a Christian, makes the most surprising admission in the book: "I have run from suffering most of my adult life, often in self-destructive ways, feeling I was unique in my self-loathing and in the deep tragedies that haunted me." (Chapter 84, p. 487). He never comes back to it. That is the book's honesty in a nutshell: real when it shows up, and rationed.
Pull Quote
Two years ago, I came to An Lao for Tet as a stranger, cautiously navigating an unfamiliar culture and the labyrinth of family dynamics. This time, I was family.
The whole book bends toward this sentence. The first lockdown made Davis a suspect, and An Lao once wanted him in a camp. At the next Tet he hands out the red envelopes for his branch of the family. The memoir's real journey is from the far side of the storm door to a seat at the table.
Hits & Misses
Hits
Diem is the book's great character, even seen from outside: frugal, fearless, impatient with sentiment, and funnier than her husband when she wants to be. The food writing is that of a man who has run a restaurant: pork rolls wrapped in perilla leaves, shark liver he compares to mousse, a cream drink that tastes like his grandmother's cheese pie. And as a record of pandemic Vietnam, with its loudspeaker trucks and timed market tickets, it has real documentary value.
Misses
Length is the first problem and sameness the second: wake, ride, eat, look, reflect, sleep. The guidebook passages stop the story without deepening it. The prose shifts between a plain diary voice and a more performed one, all fragments and flourishes, and the tense drifts between past and present within a page. Lisa and Jennie rarely step out of the plural. Diem's inner life stays shut; being told that leaving An Lao weighs on her though she does not show it is as far in as we get. And the darkness admitted in Chapter 84 is absent from everything around it.
Field Notes
- The book's quiet hero is Trieu Vi, who drives the An Lao transport seven days a week, fifty-one weeks a year, and whose van turns up at nearly every arrival and departure.
- A seam: in Chapter 54 Davis says he had only ridden through the district capital, though in Chapter 11 he rides into town for a long lunch with Diem's friends at the restaurant Nam An.
The Verdict
A baggy, sunny, sometimes repetitive memoir that turns into something better: a patient record of how a stranger becomes family.