Daniel Buckman
Because the Rain (2007)
by Daniel Buckman
"A new Hemingway" (San Francisco Chronicle) weaves together the stories of two men and the Vietnamese call girl who unites them.
Set on the rain-slicked streets of Chicago, critically acclaimed author Daniel Buckman explores the unfocused longing and unfulfilled expectations of two men balanced precariously on the edge.
Mike Spence is an unsatisfied writer with nothing left to write about. He lives in Chicago with his wife and an enormous burden of unrealized expectations hanging over his head. To escape he concocts elaborate fantasies about travel and career and how his life will be different once he gets this job, takes that vacation, marries a different girl. He ends each evening staring out his darkened window and into the apartment of a beautiful Vietnamese girl who lives in the two-flat across the street.
Donald Goetzler is a Vietnam Vet who made it through, spent the last thirty years of his life riding a desk at Weber Industrial Supply, and is now retiring with a bad Mexican buffet and a gold Rolex. He's got nothing to look forward to but his weekly session with the Vietnamese call girl who takes him back through his memories of when he was young and his life was real.
As the two men construct their elaborate fantasy worlds around the same woman, these three souls are unaware of the shocking and explosive consequences that the intersection of their lives will bring.
In a beautifully crafted novel, Daniel Buckman demonstrates the prodigious talent that informs repeated comparisons to Hemingway,Faulkner, Mailer, and O'Brien, and once again tantalizes with the possibility that his name will one day be etched in American literature alongside the masters.
Morning Dark: A Novel (2003)
Daniel Buckman has been praised for his stunning prose and sharp, riveting portrayals of the lives of American veterans in the wake of this country's twentieth-century wars. Morning Dark is the story of three generations of men from Watega County, Illinois, each pursued by the memories of the battles they fought and the wars they still dream of.
Big Walt Michalski is a decorated World War II veteran who built a plumbing empire in his hometown only to have his drunk, Vietnam-vet son, Walt, fritter away his inheritance, and the family business, on drugs and a series of dead-end marriages. Tom Jane, Walt's nephew and Big Walt's grandson, is a thirty-year-old career marine just out of the service with a dishonorable discharge. When Walt lets the memories of his failed life get the better of him, he takes off, intent on finding again the one place he ever felt free: outside the disappointed glare of Big Walt. But when he gets where he's going, he finds himself all too easily drawn back into a harrowing situation in which the life he's running from may turn out to be his only chance for salvation.
Daniel Buckman memorializes a lost class of American men who go to war and come home to work, men who exist on the fringes of the society they once risked their lives to protect. Haunting and startling, Morning Dark is a remarkable literary achievement from a talented young writer.
The Names of Rivers (2002)
A tightly crafted search for redemption within the shadows of a family’s past. Set in a rustbelt town south of Chicago, this is the story of Bruno Konick, a troubled veteran of World War II, and his grandson Luke, a boy forever dreaming of heroism in a post-Vietnam America. Examining the relationships between fathers and sons, between men and hictory, this novel echoes Hemingway's actuality, and Buckman’s vision heeds Faulkner's call for basic humanity.
Water in Darkness (2001)
Daniel Buckman speaks for a new, young generation of soldiers who thought they were at peace ~ Larry Heinemann. A young enlisted soldier haunted by his father's death in Vietnam returns home to Watega, Illinois, only to discover the same frustrated America which forced his escape into the Army. He quickly drifts north to Chicago, where he meets Danny Morrison, a violent, dispossessed Vietnam Veteran, who becomes a surrogate father for Jack Tyne, quickly pulling him into the dark heart of a violent national culture.
