The Time in Between

Set primarily in Vietnam, David Bergen’s novel The Time in Between follows Charles Boatman, a former soldier who returns to the site of his war experiences in Vietnam for reasons inexplicable to his friends and family. After his departure, his children leave America to make sense of his motivations and convince him to return. The novel addresses themes of trauma, identity, memory, individual transformation, and the unintelligibility of difficult experience. It received two high honors for fiction: the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, in 2005.

The novel begins as its main character, Vietnam War veteran Charles Boatman, vanishes from his home. He leaves behind a series of clues that his children, Jon and his older sister, Ada, use to track him down. They determine that he has most likely made his way to the large metropolitan city of Danang in Vietnam. The remainder of the novel shifts back and forth through time, telling stories from Boatman’s experiences in Washington as a young child, in addition to stories directly from his war experiences.

In Boatman’s early life, he moved to Washington to begin an ordinary government career. He met his future wife, Sara; they married and gave birth to Ada. From there, the family settled in Fraser Valley, a region of British Columbia in Canada. Since he is still a U.S. citizen, he is obligated to serve in the armed forces after being selected by the draft for the Vietnam War. When he arrives, he has difficulty adjusting to the harsh conditions and tense, strict, and orderly social arrangements of the Army. He also learns, shortly after, that Sara has been having an affair. In Vietnam, he suffers a number of traumatic experiences. Worst among his memories is that of an operation gone wrong, in which he accidentally killed an innocent child. The experience haunts him even when he is taken out of deployment.



Sara gives birth to their son, Jon. Surviving the Vietnam War, Boatman returns home. Suffering from severe, undiagnosed posttraumatic stress disorder, he is unable to let go of the haunting memory of his accidental homicide. One day, Ada discovers that he has packed his things and left. She sets off on a mission to find her dad, joined by Jon, who refuses to let her go alone. They schedule a flight to Danang and try to adjust to the city, uncertain about how long their mission will take, or whether it will bear fruit. Ada meets a local Vietnamese man named Yen. Sympathetic to her mission, which he views as a lost cause, he offers to guide and protect her during her search for Boatman.

As the two siblings flounder to find traces of their father, they begin to indulge in the cultural and social affordances of Danang. Ada begins a sexual affair with a professional artist many years her senior named Hoang Vu. Jon discovers Vietnam’s nightclub scene and becomes highly involved. The two siblings move throughout the country several times. Every time they believe they are hot on Boatman’s trail, they lose track of him, feeling they understand him less than before.

At the novel’s end, still undiscovered, Boatman comes upon a novel by Vietnamese writer Dang Tho. He resonates deeply with Tho’s philosophy that one’s life experience, even those that involve a collective aspect or some communal suffering, are essentially about the individual, and therefore, only understandable to him. As the novel closes, Boatman finally comes to peace with his memories. The Time in Between ends on a note of ambivalence: though Boatman is finally able to rationalize some aspects of his experience as a soldier, he remains alienated from his children, who remain doubly alienated in their choice to transplant themselves into an unfamiliar country.