Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

Jim Holder is a conscientious objector doing alternative service in a Chicago hospital in the late 1960s and counting the bodies on TV, in the hospital morgue, and on Chicago's streets

Genres: Fiction

229 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted to love it. Tried. Great premise ends up tired like just about every 80s novel I've read.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an Advanced Practice Nurse, and having married into the Vietnamese culture, I thought I would have a vested interest in reading the book. For the most part, that assumption was correct. The clinical portions of the book are surprisingly accurate (for the year written), but little is written about the war from the protagonist's viewpoint. Although some criticize the main character for his hypocritical ways, I find his actions to be normal human behavior; how many of us are always 100% committed to our beliefs?

I found the first half of the book interesting, but then more characters were introduced after the first half that did not add to the storyline. Although I only rated it 3 stars, I believe it was a decent read for the age of the book, and the author's literary experience. Kudos to Paul Hoover for researching the medical field so as to not make obvious blunders in the novel.

[AJourneyWithoutMap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saigon, Illinois by Paul Hoover is no ordinary story. It is the voice of a clear conscience and sanity in the sea of jingoism. It was first published in 1988 by Vintage, and the latest edition is published by Open Road Media.

Saigon, Illinois is the story of Jim Holder, who is in his twenties, and he is a young man who refused to be drafted for the war in Vietnam. Instead, he volunteers to work at a government hospital in Chicago. The draft board classified him as a conscientious objector, and he sets out to perform alternative service to his country at a large hospital in Chicago in 1969. Together with his friends, they try to deal with issues raised during that turbulent period.

It is a wonderful book with a message that should echo and re-echo.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a scene from Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, that I like to use by way of illustrating postmodern irony to my students. In this scene, the main character, David Bell, is in an art gallery assessing “an exhibit of prize-winning war photographs.” Of course, this being DeLillo, the emphasis is not on the war or its politics but on the “power of the image,” and so although we’re confronted with “an immense color blow-up, about ten feet wide and twenty feet high” of a “woman holding a dead child in her arms” the narrative attention is concentrated on the group of children circling her who “were smiling and waving, apparently at the camera.” The absurdity of the moment is made complete as Bell describes the “young man” who “was down on one knee in the middle of the lobby, photographing the photograph. I stood behind him for a moment and the effect was unforgettable. Time and space were annihilated and it seemed that the children were waving at him. Such is the prestige of the camera, its almost religious authority, its hypnotic power to command reverence from subject and bystander alike, and I stood absolutely motionless until the young man snapped the picture.” What I find so striking about this scene – as I do with similar ones from Pynchon and Coover – is the postmodern attitude’s incongruity with matters of self-evident import and gravity. Since the postmodern sophisticate is beholden to the maintenance of his own studied aloofness – making sure to couch all opinion or belief in irony lest one be forced to endure the socially costly accusation of naïveté – he can’t offer a sincere comment on, say, the Vietnam War, because doing so would reveal his credulity (which is always already overcredulity) with respect to an ultimately baseless metanarrative. In other words, postmodern lit. isn’t very good at talking about its feelings, leaving us with a canon that is at once replete with pyrotechnic writing and empty of emotional sustenance. Hoover, in his novel, Saigon, Illinois – a novel, by the way, that comes clothed in pomo’s vestments, as it was published as part of the Vintage Contemporaries series – seems to want to strike a balance between (then-)trendy superficiality and depth, for which he is to be commended. Jim Holder is a conscientious objector from Malta, Indiana, who has to find work for two years doing a service job in lieu of military conscription. From a list of unsavory choices, Holder picks a sort of middle-management hospital administrator position in Chicago, where it is his job to help run several of the hospital’s floors. It’s here that Holder finds himself, what do you know?, regularly confronting death, taking orders from cantankerous (and often antagonistic) doctors, nurses, and staff, suspected of drug trafficking, and ever-more-intimate with a small squad of admin.s like himself. Of course, this is all meant to parallel what his experience at war would likely have been, a narrative device underscored when Holder winds up in the hospital himself after being struck by a cop during an anti-war protest in downtown Chicago. After making a disparaging comment about one of the hospital’s hated nurses (with that very nurse standing right behind him), Holder finds himself out of a job and therefore in trouble with the draft board. To this Holder decides to drive his Chevy Nova to California’s Pacific coast (an ocean with a symbolic linguistic resonance) where he strips off his clothes and gets in the water, come what may. And while that may sound like a neat novel, and like a sophisticated comment on the War, and like a way around the pomo antifoundationalist trap, the book came across as lost and confused, like it wanted to have it both ways. I just could not get a bead on Hoover’s sensibilities. Scenes of Holder getting high with peaceniks in his apartment were contrasted with long descriptions of his duties at the hospital; scenes of Walter Cronkite reported the day’s war news were contrasted with retellings of Pynchonesque capers of the Union for a Free Union (FU) storming draft offices with ketchup. I never found myself convinced of Holder’s convictions, and so also found his narrative voice to be rather limp, giving the novel a weightlessness that seems unintentional. “Say what you want about the tenets of [postmodernism],” says Walter Sobchak, “at least its an ethos.”

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an odd book. For most of it, it seems very much like a novel written in the late 1960s or early 1970s (it takes place during Vietnam), which often works and probably just as often doesn't work. Some of the characters are affecting, and effective, portraits; others are less effective caricatures. And for much of the novel, the narrator, Jim Holder, is a cypher, more an observer of the world of the Chicago hospital where he is doing his service as a conscientious objector than as a participant. He meets the downtrodden and cast out, sees and dead and dying, and is battered by the world around him. When he finally goes home, the novel crystallizes, painting a portrait of a young man whose experience with the unfeeling system of the hospital and American society has been as traumatic for him as any veteran's experience in war. When he strikes out into the Pacific Ocean, one is reminded of Yossarian paddling his way to Switzerland. This novel has its flaws, but is still well worth reading.

[Eric Kirkman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had a lot of heart. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War participates in alternative service at a Chicago Hospital. The other characters are split into two groups, those that also work in the hospital and his hippie roommates. Not really bound to a central plot, the story felt more like a collection of short stories that are wrapped up together at the end.

Even though Chicago isn't ever described in any vivid detail, the use of streets and locations did give it an authentic feel. The writing is similar to Jay McInerney in terms of pace and style.

[William Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hokie. Unlikely happenings written to be 'dark comedy' but falls short. Worst of all, not very interesting.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For an instant, I imagined my own corpse lying in bed, looking bucktoothed and stupid. I could feel millions of microbes crawling over my skin, incessantly eating each other. Everything in the world is constantly being buried by a fine layer of dust; it even falls on your eyeballs as you lie in bed after sex."

[Ken Dowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know how I missed this book when it was published in the late 80’s. This is about my people. And my era. Guys who left high school looking over their shoulder at the specter of Selective Service. Hoover’s hero is Holden, a guy from Indiana who gets Conscientious Objector status, and is sent to a hospital in Chicago for two years of alternative service. There he finds death and craziness. But probably not as much as he would have found in Saigon. There are times the book made me laugh out loud. Like at the hospital Christmas talent show where “three black guys from the laundry room sang doo-wop songs from the fifties” and the head of the accounting department sang “What’s New, Pussycat?, an act that “was exactly what you’d expect from an accountant singing a Tom Jones number.”

When Holder’s buddies raided the local draft board and stole their records they finished the job by nailing Trotsky’s shoes to the floor, though “no one in Joliet has any idea what Trotsky’s shoes looked like.” The same folks had a lively debate about whether Bugs Bunny was a capitalist tool, the kind of conversation that was a standard for my generation of college students. And there was the obligatory Godard movie which Holder described as having “no story to speak of…characters simply stood around in a barnyard, talking straight at the camera about political issues that were obscure to us.”

The story is filled with the characters of the times, like the Selective Service guy who leans over his desk “face sagging like a bag of cheese.” And Holder’s buddy’s father, a “furious crypto-fascist who lived for illicit arms, survivalism and anti-Semitic tracts on cheap paper.” All-in-all I’m glad I spent some time poking around the local used bookstore where I uncovered this one.

[McNatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected at all, Hoover is sharp and witty and I enjoyed his writing style. I did however expect Holder to be broken, like most great war novels, no one is immune, his spirit taken by the system that he rejected. I sense the character Holder flirted with despair but kicked on, maybe he would have cracked had he been older and more uncertain, his youthful anarchic persona kept him floating on the surface. Hoover is clever cornering Holder in a Hospital where he faces the severity of death everyday. The author seems to question Holder about his own mortality but Holder is largely unaffected. I am not sure whether this is Holders strong character or a failure on the authors behalf to devise Holders broken will. Holder is a confident, self assured young man who is perhaps fortunate to stumble into his existence, fit, attractive, bright and carefree, this image is never shaken and I guess I am a little disappointed. The romanticism of the sixties is played out against a back drop of America's evil foreign policy in south east Asia and yet the author doesn't force the reader to challenge and rise up against the government but prefers to skate in the shadows. This is perhaps what occurred, Holder is just a smart kid trying to stay alive, he beats the system the way we all think we do in our small way. The book in this sense is light, easy reading with a morbid theme which to be fare is the basis of war, death and suffering is not overlooked in the book and in that sense Hoover nails the point. I'm conflicted on my review on whether this is too light a book or just right. However I'm keeping it and making others read it so its worth it.

[Sonia Reppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I thought that by not going to Vietnam, I would have no contact with death, but every day I carried bodies to the morgue. Sometimes on the el I felt I was choking to death. Once a rock flew against the el car window where I was sitting and shattered the glass in a weblike pattern. There were people out there who wanted to do me harm, even though they didn't know me."
This is a piece of Americana that is underexplored: the life of a conscientious objector. In 1968, Jim Holder tries to avoid the draft by doing "alternative service" as a CO in a Chicago hospital. He has to work for two years and then he's free, but if he is found unsatisfactory and is fired, to boot camp or prison he goes. He escapes (temporarily?) the clutches of the national government just to find himself at the mercy of sticky hospital politics.
The writing is infused with ironies and black humor, and takes us into Holder's head and makes the reader relate to him. He is no revolutionary, although we do meet some in the book, and you could say he is not a true CO because he makes his girlfriend get an abortion, and he is not religious. Yet, somehow, he seems like the only sane person in a crazy world.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Saigon, Illinois tells the story of Jim Holder, a young 20-something year old who doesn't want to be drafted to Vietnam, so instead he works at a government hospital in Chicago. I really liked the message the book had about war and what a country is like in a time of war, because for Jim he didn't want to be drafted to avoid death and dead people, but working in a hospital he had to take bodies to the morgue daily. I didn't like the weird political undertones the book had mainly because I don't think they added much to the book. There was a look of conspiring from Jim's friends about a very controversial political party which they were a part of, and I don't think that added anything to the book. It was interesting to read but I would recommend it to everyone.

[Bill Baar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great reminder of how nasty were the late 60s and early 70s. I was just a year or two younger and i than the hero of this story and in Chicago too. Hoover captured the moment. It wasn't a good one.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rupert, yes, I finally finished, and I loved it.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sounds like a cliché, but this is a great first novel. The middle hospital portion of the book is full of stories that range from deathly serious to funny, sometimes in the same paragraph.