In Lily Tuck's Siam, the year is 1967 and 25-year-old Claire has come to Bangkok with her brand-new husband, a military advisor. When they first met, James had described Thailand as "not a bad place to live. Everyone's so friendly, everyone's always smiling. And you should see my house--hot and cold running servants, a pool, a garden..." But upon arrival in this exotic locale--which her guidebook, too, extols as the "Venice of the East"--Claire discovers dead dogs floating in the canals, green slime growing on the surface of the pool, and the natives polite but distant. The one person she feels an instant bond with is Jim Thompson, an American silk entrepreneur she encounters at a party. But immediately afterward, Thompson disappears during a trip to the Cameron Highlands, and Claire becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him.

Siam is a work of fiction. Jim Thompson, however, was an actual person whose disappearance in Thailand has never been solved. Tuck uses this real-life mystery to illuminate her fictional characters' relationships and motivations. It's clear from the first chapter that Claire is a young woman without a solid sense of self. She is swept quite literally off her feet and into bed within hours of first meeting James, and a good deal of what happens to her from that point on seems to occur without her active participation or consent: Several times a day Claire raised her skirt, dropped her pants. Her fingers, too, learned to unzip, to unbutton with the swiftness and skill of a lacemaker. It was not how Claire had imagined it, but there was hardly time for anything else. Though she tries hard to be a "good guest" in Thailand, attempting to learn the language and history of her new home, she is never truly at ease among the people. Claire's fixation on the fate of a man she met only once grows in direct proportion to her feelings of loneliness and alienation. Meanwhile, America's escalating role in the Vietnam War parallels her increasing suspicion of everyone around her, even her husband--and soon the conditions are ripe for tragedy. Tuck weaves this intricate web of fact and fiction, reality and delusion, with an assured hand and prose that seems simpler than it actually is. She captures to perfection the disorientation of strangers in a strange land, the insularity of expatriate communities, and the gulf that yawns between privileged foreigners and the people they live among. Siam, then, is both a compelling drama and a profound meditation on the political and the personal. --Sheila Bright


From Publishers Weekly
Probing the futility of good intentions and the pitfalls of cultural miscommunication, this assured and absorbing third novel by Tuck (The Woman Who Walked on Water) opens on March 9, 1967, the day the U.S. starts bombing North Vietnam from bases in Thailand. Claire, a 25-year-old Boston bride, arrives in Bangkok with her husband, James, an American engineer who builds runways in Nakhon Phanom, in northeast Thailand, for the American bombers. James's weekly trips to supervise construction leave his young, conspicuously blonde wife to fend for herself, and Claire discovers almost immediately that the luxurious lifestyle James described has an unpleasant underside. The heat is unrelenting; their pool is covered with green slime; the servants wash in a sewage-filled canal; hot peppers make most food indigestible to her. Unlike the few other American wives she meets, Claire is driven to question her surroundings, but the information she garners in hours of research at the local British library, through her daily language classes and on shopping excursions around the city is even more disturbing. Snubbed by Thai acquaintances when she tries to discuss the political situation, she turns to her husband, but insensitive James treats her as little more than a sexual object. Meanwhile, Claire becomes obsessed with legendary American entrepreneur Jim Thompson, who has disappeared while on a trip to the Highlands. Though she has met him only once, Thompson typifies to Claire all the mysterious events that seem to be going on just outside her circle of understanding. As the political and cultural climate in Bangkok grows increasingly oppressive, Claire begins to lose touch with reality, and her feverish imaginings precipitate tragedy. Tuck uses words with economy, evoking the lush locale and mysterious culture of Thailand with precise details and sensory images, and effectively contrasting the crisp, arrogant attitude of the American colony with the polite if evasive conduct of the Thai population. Her vivid, unromanticized picture of Bangkok in the late '60s is a fitting backdrop for a haunting story about the end of innocence. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Margot Livesey
In her own unique and vivid fashion, Tuck has written a novel that asks profound questions about America's involvement in Southeast Asia and about the possibilities for intimacy and communication, not only across cultures but within marriages.


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
She has written an elegant novel that gives us a telling portrait of a woman, a marriage and a culture all at the same time.


From Booklist
Aspects of distance are explored in Tuck's latest novel. Claire, a young American woman newly married to a man involved with building airstrips for U.S. bombing planes, travels to Thailand on the eve of the Vietnam War. As she struggles to learn the language, handle servants, and deal with her husband, Claire finds herself drawn into a mystery with no solution. Her search for Jim Thompson, a man met only briefly at a dinner party, parallels the earliest beginnings of the war. A mix of lush details and loosely connected passages describe Claire's life in Thailand. As she searches for Jim, studies Thai with Miss Pat, spies on her husband, and suspects her servants of stealing, Claire becomes more and more detached from her old life and never seems to fully understand her new environment. Building at a languorous pace, Tuck presents a discordant ending that serves to underscore in the reader the sense of distance that has surrounded Claire since her flight into Siam. Neal Wyatt


From Kirkus Reviews
For her third outing, Tuck (The Woman Who Walked on Water, 1996, etc.) goes to Thailand with a young American couple, both shallow enough to frustrate the reader as much as fulfill the otherwise often witty story they're a part of. On their wedding night in 1967, James and Claire fly to Bangkok, where James works for JUSMAAG (Joint United States Military Assistance Advisory Group) building airstrips in the jungle at Nakhan Phanom. When he's away doing this, the highly intelligent but excruciatingly inert Claire tries to busy herself with training the household servants (the young man Prachi must keep leaves out of the swimming pool), reading Thai history, going on tours with other JUSMAAG wives, taking language lessonsand obsessing about what really happened to Jim Thompson, the 61-year-old American silk zillionaire who now, just days after having James and Claire as dinner guests at his palatial house, has disappeared without a trace, said by some to be lost in the jungle, by others to have been snatched by the communists, and thought by Claire herself (though not until storys end) to have been kidnaped by the Americans themselves for some invidious reason vaguely connected with the growing war next door in Vietnam. As he has from page one, her new husband and egregious male chauvinist pig James denigrates and belittles this and any other ideas that Claire may haveso that her paranoia-cum-truth only festers in her own mental hothouse. Since not much more happens (aside from the event telegraphed by the book's subtitlethough even why that happens will puzzle the thoughtful), readers are left with little more than exotic atmospherewhich Tuck excels at, as she does also at Third World squalorand a building sense of the portentous without any final payoff. Deft, incisive, colorful, but by and large a tale only of echoes. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"[Siam is] a spare, strange and fascinating novel that manages to capture both a culture and a single human heart on the verge of devastating change." --Alice McDermott

The Sewanee Writers' Series--a joint publishing venture between the Overlook Press and The Sewanee Writers' Conference--finishes its first year with the publication of Lily Tuck's Siam, a haunting novel of intrigue and lost innocence set in Thailand during the onset of the Vietnam conflict.

Siam tells the story of Claire, a Boston bride of a government contractor based in Bangkok, who arrives in her new home on March 9, 1967, the very day that US planes start bombing North Vietnam from bases in Thailand. At a dinner party soon afterwards, Claire meets and befriends Jim Thompson, the famous real-life American entrepreneur whose disappearance weeks later fosters in her suspicions of other people in her life. It is only a matter of time before her search for the truth about Jim Thompson, and the truth about her new home, brings about irrevocably tragic results.

A powerful and evocative work in the tradition of Graham Greene and Joan Didion, Siam is the American experience in Vietnam writ small, and establishes Lily Tuck as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Margot Livesey - New York Times Book Review

In her own unique and vivid fashion, Tuck has written a novel that asks profound questions about America's involvement in Southeast Asia and about the possibilities for intimacy and communication, not only across cultures but within marriages.

Publishers Weekly

Probing the futility of good intentions and the pitfalls of cultural miscommunication, this assured and absorbing third novel by Tuck (The Woman Who Walked on Water) opens on March 9, 1967, the day the U.S. starts bombing North Vietnam from bases in Thailand. Claire, a 25-year-old Boston bride, arrives in Bangkok with her husband, James, an American engineer who builds runways in Nakhon Phanom, in northeast Thailand, for the American bombers. James's weekly trips to supervise construction leave his young, conspicuously blonde wife to fend for herself, and Claire discovers almost immediately that the luxurious lifestyle James described has an unpleasant underside. The heat is unrelenting; their pool is covered with green slime; the servants wash in a sewage-filled canal; hot peppers make most food indigestible to her. Unlike the few other American wives she meets, Claire is driven to question her surroundings, but the information she garners in hours of research at the local British library, through her daily language classes and on shopping excursions around the city is even more disturbing. Snubbed by Thai acquaintances when she tries to discuss the political situation, she turns to her husband, but insensitive James treats her as little more than a sexual object. Meanwhile, Claire becomes obsessed with legendary American entrepreneur Jim Thompson, who has disappeared while on a trip to the Highlands. Though she has met him only once, Thompson typifies to Claire all the mysterious events that seem to be going on just outside her circle of understanding. As the political and cultural climate in Bangkok grows increasingly oppressive, Claire begins to lose touch with reality, and her feverish imaginings precipitate tragedy. Tuck uses words with economy, evoking the lush locale and mysterious culture of Thailand with precise details and sensory images, and effectively contrasting the crisp, arrogant attitude of the American colony with the polite if evasive conduct of the Thai population. Her vivid, unromanticized picture of Bangkok in the late '60s is a fitting backdrop for a haunting story about the end of innocence. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Margot Livesey - The New York Times Book Review

Out of these elements, Tuck builds to a highly suspenseful climax. Like the heat-seeking missiles Claire so vividly imagines, ''Siam'' moves relentlessly toward tragedy. For the characters, there is grief and anger and, finally, violence. For the reader, there is the satisfaction of seeing that every detail, ''no matter how mundane or trivial,'' has indeed taken on significance. In her own unique and vivid fashion, Tuck has written a novel that asks profound questions about America's involvement in Southeast Asia and about the possibilities for intimacy and communication, not only across cultures but within marriages.

The New Yorker

...[an] elegant, gripping read.

Kirkus Reviews

For her third outing, Tuck (The Woman Who Walked on Water, 1996, etc.) goes to Thailand with a young American couple, both shallow enough to frustrate the reader as much as fulfill the otherwise often witty story they're a part of. On their wedding night in 1967, James and Claire fly to Bangkok, where James works for JUSMAAG (Joint United States Military Assistance Advisory Group) building airstrips in the jungle at Nakhan Phanom. When he's away doing this, the highly intelligent but excruciatingly inert Claire tries to busy herself with training the household servants (the young man Prachi must keep leaves out of the swimming pool), reading Thai history, going on tours with other JUSMAAG wives, taking language lessons—and obsessing about what really happened to Jim Thompson, the 61-year-old American silk zillionaire who now, just days after having James and Claire as dinner guests at his palatial house, has disappeared without a trace, said by some to be lost in the jungle, by others to have been snatched by the communists, and thought by Claire herself (though not until story's end) to have been kidnaped by the Americans themselves for some invidious reason vaguely connected with the growing war next door in Vietnam. As he has from page one, her new husband and egregious male chauvinist pig James denigrates and belittles this and any other ideas that Claire may have—so that her paranoia-cum-truth only festers in her own mental hothouse. Since not much more happens (aside from the event telegraphed by the book's subtitle—though even why that happens will puzzle the thoughtful), readers are left with little more than exotic atmosphere—which Tuck excels at, as shedoes also at Third World squalor—and a building sense of the portentous without any final payoff. Deft, incisive, colorful, but by and large a tale only of echoes.