Synopses & Reviews
Spanning twenty-five years of cultural upheaval, moving from Montana to San Francisco to Saigon,
The Given World is a major debut novel about the effects of war on those left at home, by an author who is “strong, soulful, and deeply gifted” (Lorrie Moore,
New York Times bestselling author of
Birds of America).
When Riley and her parents get the news that her big brother, Mick, is missing in action in Vietnam, it blows a hole in the family bigger than any landmine could. Riley takes refuge in isolation and drugs but a few years later falls in love with Darrell, a boy from the local reservation who tells her of his induction into the Army just as Riley discovers she’s pregnant, at seventeen. Left behind again, Riley begins a journey that takes her to San Francisco, Saigon, the haunted tunnels of Cu Chi, and finally back to Montana. Maybe she is searching for her brother, but mostly she is searching for a way to be in the world without him, a way to trust love again.
The Given World introduces an extraordinary cast of characters — including Primo, the big-hearted, half-blind vet; Lu, a cab-driving addict with an artist’s eye; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train carrying her grandmother’s ashes — all are members of a lost generation coming of age too quickly as they struggle to put together lives interrupted by loss. At center stage is Riley, a masterpiece of vulnerability and tenacity, wondering if she’ll ever have the courage to go home again.
Review
"In The Given World, Marian Palaia has assembled a collection of restive seekers and beautifully told their stories of love and lovelessness, home and homelessness, with an emphasis on both makeshift and enduring ideas of family. It has been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world. She has a great ear for dialogue, a feel for dramatic confrontation, and a keen understanding of when background suddenly becomes foreground. She is a strong, soulful, and deeply gifted writer." Lorrie Moore, author of Bark
Review
The Given World is astonishing in every regard: the voice, the range of characters, the charismatic, colloquial dialogue, the ability to summon, through telling detail, geographically diverse worlds that are far flung, but still cohere. Vietnam, counter-cultural San Francisco, the Vietnam War draft’s resonance on a Montana reservation, all give evocative shape and texture to an historical era. It’s edgy, often cutting, humorous, and impassioned.
Review
From the moment I met Riley I was drawn into her world, which is really ours, America in the last century as it careened into this one. I found this novel as thrilling and surprising as a ride on a vintage motorcycle, along the winding, sometimes hair-raising but always arresting ride that is Riley’s life. It is a trip I will always remember.
Review
Marian Palaia is a writer of startling grace and sensuous lyricism—reading her, you feel as if you've never heard language this beautiful and this true. The Given World deserves a place on the shelf beside the pantheon of extraordinary war novels of our time such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
Review
"Marian Palaia has imaginatively engaged the Vietnam War these many decades later and transformed it into a brilliant and complex narrative able to transcend that war, all wars, all politics, all eras and illuminate the great and eternally enduring human quest for self, for an identity, for a place in the universe. The Given World is a splendid first novel by an exciting new artist."
Review
Marian Palaia is a writer of remarkable talent. In Riley, she has captured Vietnam's long shadow with prose that cuts straight to the bone. Readers who enjoyed Jennifer Egan's The Invisible Circus will love The Given World.
Review
"Not all the American casualties of Vietnam went to war. In stunning, gorgeous prose, in precise, prismatic detail, Palaia begins with that rupture and works her way deep into the aftermath -- its impact on one person, on one family, on one country. Riveting and revelatory." Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Review
"Some rare books give you the sense that a writer has been walking around with a story for years, storing it up, ruminating on it. This is one of those books. I'm grateful for the slow and patient emergence of these words on the page. No sentence is wasted. However long The Given World took, it was worth every minute." Peter Orner, author of The Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Synopsis
"Complex and haunting...vivid and unforgettable." --People
"Ardent, ambitious." --The New York Times Book Review
"Stunning...elegant...It's enormously refreshing to read a story that talks about complicated women with so much empathy." --Missoula Independent
"Reverberates with the tones of a modern western--except that its tough-talking hero is a woman...all surliness and cheek...self-punishing, defiant, vulnerable." --San Francisco Chronicle
From a quiet family farm in Montana in the 60s to the grit and haze of San Francisco in the 70s to a gypsy-populated, post-war Saigon, The Given World spins around its unconventional and unforgettable heroine, Riley. When her big brother is declared MIA in Vietnam, young Riley packs up her shattered heart and leaves her family, her first love, and "a few small things" behind. By trial and error she builds a new life, working on cars, delivering newspapers, tending bar. She befriends, rescues, and is rescued by a similarly vagabond cast of characters whose "'unraveled souls' sting hardest and linger the longest." (The New York Times Book Review) Foolhardy, funny, and wise, Riley's challenge as she grows into a woman is simple: survive long enough to go home again, or at least figure out where home is, and who might be among the living there.
Lorrie Moore said, "It's been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world." The Given World is the remarkable debut of "an immense writing talent." (Booklist)
Synopsis
A sweeping portrait of post-Vietnam America seen through the eyes of a young woman searching for the courage to go home again.
It is 1968. Riley is thirteen, and her brother Mick has gone missing in Vietnam. She struggles to understand and accept, but the world she has always known has fallen apart. At sixteen, she meets a boy from the reservation. He becomes her first love and perhaps her deliverance, except that he, too, is sent to fight, unaware that Riley is carrying his child. Riley sets off then, in search of answers, of clues, of a way to be in the world. She travels from her family’s Montana farm to San Francisco, and from there to Saigon. Along the way she becomes rescued and rescuer, by and for a band of scarred angels. Among them: Primo, a half-blind vet with a story he’s not telling; Lu, a cab driver with an artist’s eye and a habit she can’t kick; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid who is Riley’s conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her dreams and her grandmother’s ashes in a tin box. All are casualties, of the times and of the war, but they carry on, none more tenaciously than Riley herself, a masterpiece of courage and vulnerability, wondering if she’ll ever be brave enough to return to the place she once called home.
About the Author
Marian Palaia was born in Riverside, California, and grew up there and in Washington, DC. She lives in San Francisco and has also lived in Montana, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nepal, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. Marian has also been a truck driver, a bartender, and a logger. The Given World is her first novel.