Good morning, Vietnam - The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Book group pretty much reached consensus on Camilla Gibb's The Beauty of Humanity Movement -a book w/ a lot of good information, a view of North Vietnam that we seldom if ever see, a novel that upends our belief about the egalitarian socialist government and the noble agrarian peasants, but for all that kind of a didactic novel without much depth of character - they're all "two-dimensional," that is, each stands for something - the old and long-suffering displaced rural peasant, the new Vietnamese youth plugged into rap music, sneakers, and pop culture, living off the nascent tourist trade and resenting it, and so on. In the end, I felt it was a novel w/out the courage of its convictions: Gibb has written a very dark novel in which impoverished Vietnamese suffer under every form of government - colonial, communist, neo-capitalist - but she is unwilling to bring the novel to a dark conclusion. All kinds of plot devices get shoe-horned into the last few chapters, and the novel ends with everyone happy and virtue rewarded. That unearned harmonious ending is at odds with the great difficulties that the characters, especially the pho chef, Hung, have faced over many years, generations. The long-delayed romance between Hung and the much, much young beauty, Lan, is really not credible, either, and in fact it's a little creepy. All that said, there's been very little fiction in English about this culture so Gibb has given us a novel that lets us see the world from another point of view, which is something. I just wish she'd done so less schematically and with great depth of character.