DATE: Sunday, July 27, 1997                 TAG: 9707170648

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JOE COCCARO 

                                            LENGTH:   66 lines

EXPLORING VIETNAM FROM INSICE A '54 BUICK

ALL SOULS' DAY

BILL MORRIS

Avon Books. 325 pp. $23.

Most Americans know Vietnam only as the place where we lost a war we had no business entering in the first place. For many kids it's a short, sterile history lesson. For adults, it conjures images of peace rallies, news footage of GIs wading through rice paddies and a veterans' memorial in Washington.

Journalist Bill Morris wanted to go beyond the news blips of America's first televised war. He wanted to convey the sensuality and humor of the people of Southeast Asia, their poverty, conniving and zest.

``I wanted to go smell the place,'' Morris said in a recent interview from his Greensboro, N.C., home. ``The place is beautiful and filthy.''

In 1994, Morris, a former reporter with The Virginian-Pilot and former columnist with the Greensboro News & Record, spent six months traveling in Thailand and Vietnam. The result of his trip is All Souls' Day, a novel rich with texture, vivid writing, historical significance and just enough humor and eroticism to make it fun - but not trivial.

All Souls' Day is Morris' second novel. The first, Motor City, won him high praise in 1992.

Motor City unfolds in Detroit in the 1950s, when a booming, fiercely competitive auto industry cranked out chrome and metal chariots in flaming colors to match the times. Motown started to bloom, and Marilyn Monroe became a marketing pawn.

All Souls' Day is set in 1963. In it, Morris uses a similar blend of fact and fiction. Marlon Brando and JFK, symbols of that era, make cameo appearances.

The two novels are linked by 1954 Buicks. Motor City was about design piracy. All Souls' Day starts off with an ex-patriot Navy frogman named Sam Malloy importing into Bangkok the last of seven restored '54 Buicks.

Sam runs a hotel and plans to use the cars to start a taxi service, which is so bizarre, so American, that the service is a hit with GIs and Asian dignitaries. Morris got the idea, he says, after learning about a wartime taxi business in Saigon run by an American and a Vietnamese; they, too, imported big U.S. gas guzzlers.

Sam, a wounded military hero, is enchanted by Thailand and conflicted by his home country's meddling in Vietnam. His older brother, Charlie Malloy, works in Saigon as a reporter for Time magazine and is part of a clique of real-life journalists. Morris names names and positively vilifies Pulitizer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Halberstam.

Through Charlie, Sam meets the idealistic and rich, blonde and beautiful Anne Sinclair. She and Sam fall in love.

Sam avoids any discussion about his military past, and Anne, who works for Information Services for Henry Cabot Lodge, determines to find out Sam's dark secret and to share with him some of her own.

Morris spends a lot of time building toward the moment when Sam tells all. Reader expectation is high, but Sam's big wartime secret doesn't quite deliver.

The novel also builds to a test of Sam's allegiance. Through Anne, Sam learns of a secret military coup against South Vietnam's government being orchestrated by its supposed ally, the United States. It takes an outraged Anne to provoke Sam to act.

Despite the occasional thinness of the plot, All Souls' Day is superbly written and researched. It's an entertaining take on modern history. MEMO: Joe Coccaro is a senior editor at The Virginian Pilot.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu