“Falling Through the Earth” by Danielle Trusso is more than just her memoir, it also serves as a sort of memoir for her father, a Vietnam Veteran who served time doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the war, clearing out the tunnels. Her father brought the war back home with him, as most Vets of that war did, and this memoir deals not only with the life of Danielle, but also on how her relationship with her father suffered because of it. Trusso sets out to illustrate just how war effects not only the people involved directly, but the loved ones of the people who served too. When she takes a trip to Vietnam as a young woman, she discovers that the war still goes on in some sense. The people there certainly haven't forgotten their invaders, nor have they forgiven them.
The story follows three main narratives, Danielle's past growing up with her father, Danielle's trip to Vietnam to better understand the war and her father, and her father's tour of duty in Vietnam. She cuts back and forth between these time lines effortlessly, and without creating any sense of confusion. The section about growing up focuses mainly on their family life, and the ways it affected her and her siblings. Her trip to Vietnam covers a wide range of experiences, from meeting other people who served, to praying in a Buddhist temple, to being chased across town by a potentially harmful man in an Iron Maiden T-shirt, to crawling through the tunnels where her father nearly died. And finally, the section that follows her father discusses his time in Vietnam, the people he served with, the tunnels he crawled through, and the things he had to do to survive. Each one of these sections is really about Trusso trying to understand her father, a quest she'd been trying to accomplish for as long as she can remember.
Trusso does a great job of showing her father as a complicated man, full of things to both love and hate. She describes him as a man who never showed signs of weakness, and never saw a fight worth backing down from. He was hard working, and charismatic. But he was wounded, scarred emotionally from the war and a hard childhood. He was incapable of asking for help, or apologizing, and was a hard man to know. He had problems with drinking, speeding, and keeping women. Trusso's father clearly cared deeply about his family, and the daughter that stuck by him the longest and took his namesake, Danielle, he just couldn't communicate that to his children. Overall, the father seems like a sympathetic character, but is mostly unlikable. She does her best to never flat out trash any of the people in her story, but portray them as honestly as she can. Even her potential attacker in Vietnam is not fully condemned, as she actually attempts to figure out just why he does what he does.
Trusso switches from personal vignettes, to imagined memories, to standard prose narration, and more to capture the events of her life, and the life of those around her. Her stories switches from light moments, to dark and heavy ones, to humorous ones as well. She keeps changing pace, and I think it definitely helps keep the reader engaged. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to connect at all with the author or the narrative since I know very little about Vietnam, or about growing up hard and fast in Wisconsin, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to connect to both. I think that reflecting on her life, Trusso sees that she was as hard to know as her father was, and the two of them being cut from the same cloth made it hard for either one of them to talk about things. She reveals this to us by putting in plenty of stories where she was the one who hurt her father, instead of the other way around.
The settings in Trusso's story are just as important as the people who populate them. There are three main settings that have a huge impact on the story, Vietnam, Roscoe's, and the Trussoni Court. Vietnam is obviously a crucial setting in the threads about her father and about her trip there to better understand the war and it's impact on her father, but Roscoe's and the Trussoni Court are major settings in her childhood. The former is a bar where she grew up, where her and her fathered connected, and where her father met old friends and veterans. The latter was a childhood home where most of her pleasant memories took place, until her parents got a divorce. Most of the story takes place in these three settings, and we get to know them as well as Trusso did.
Overall, I think Trusso did a terrific job of capturing her father and her life the way they truly were, full of both good and bad moments, full of accomplishments and disappointments, full of people and places that shaped the way she was, and the way she is. Her quest to understand her father, the war, and the way they impacted each other was apparent all the way throughout the narrative.
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