Lightning on the Sun: A Novel - Hardcover

If you give your protagonist a name as terse and manly as Asher, you had better be writing a thriller. Robert Bingham's antihero in Lightning on the Sun is in fact called Asher, but the novel isn't quite sure whether it's a thriller or not. The material is right for suspense: Bingham demonstrates a working knowledge of Cambodia (where he was a reporter) and a deeper knowledge of the byzantine pathways of New York old money. It seems, too, that he has had at least a passing acquaintance with the pleasures of heroin--he died of an overdose in early 2000, and his novel is well dusted with white powder. You can see how a writer with this kind of stuff at hand would be unable to resist turning it into a thriller.

The plot is drug-deal boilerplate: Asher, eager to flee Phnom Penh after several years there, borrows money from a Cambodian loan shark and sends a huge shipment of heroin to his ex-girlfriend, who works in a topless bar in Manhattan. The hapless, blue-blazer-wearing reporter Reese is unwittingly tapped to transport the goods from Cambodia to America. Events, needless to say, do not go as planned. Bad juju travels back and forth between the two countries, and by the end, the Khmer Rouge are waving hoes around.

The plot is fairly creaky, full of exposition and coincidence, but the novel is written well enough to keep the pages turning. In fact, by the end, one wonders if Bingham really needs the trappings of suspense at all. His characters are maddening and complex, full of surprising heroism and predictable failures. And his details of life in both countries resound with rightness. He understands the way aid organizations and crime together propel the daily life of Cambodia. "The Russians were known for their criminal sociability and saw their stay in Cambodia as a financial boondoggle. They were thieves, and the UN was a great unguarded henhouse for the fox." And anyone who's spent any time in Southeast Asia will understand Reese's response to hearing a Cambodian band swing into a rendition of "Hotel California": "'Oh, Lord,' said Reese, placing his hand to his temples. 'Please. Not again.'" A great thriller Lightning on the Sun is not, but Bingham's textured depiction of expat life is worth a look. --Claire Dederer

Advance Praise for Lightning on the Sun:

"Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a beautifully written tale of adventure in the Conradian tradition. Following that tradition, it treats with moral ambiguity and collapse in fateful tropic places where late imperial Americans and Europeans encounter and continue a degenerate version of the great games of history. Missionaries, do-gooders, criminals and adventurers from the outside prey on and are preyed upon by the inhabitants of the lands they would exploit in a cycle of violence and mutual corruption. Witty, highly sophisticated and richly entertaining, it is bursting with life-affirming energy that overlays a tragic vision. Robert Bingham has given us a superb novel."
--Robert Stone

"Terrifying action/pitiful land/pitiable characters/terrible situation--Aristotle couldn't have asked for a better mix of terror and pity."
--P.J. O'Rourke

"Robert Bingham's novel vividly narrates the story of a young American struggling to find himself amid the chaos, corruption, and danger that currently pervade Cambodia. It is tragic that Bingham died before he could enjoy the praise he so richly deserves."
--Stanley Karnow

"Robert Bingham was a young master whose novel--which reads like a poem and moves like a thriller--shifts locale with confident ease. Lightning on the Sun shines an uncompromising light on contemporary life. His characters respond to the world in a way that is both appalling and natural. Bingham's work is the lost heir to Graham Greene and Robert Stone."
--Chris Offutt

"Lightning on the Sun slammed into me like no other novel since Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and no other expatriate fiction before that since Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It's as if Robert Bingham swallowed the world whole and proceeded to sweat out its wickedness and moral dissolution into literary perfection. In Mr. Bingham's whipsaw prose, the underside of the empire that is us--America in the '90s--has finally found--and just as quickly lost--its truest, most unforgiving voice. Hip, arrogant, brilliantly successful, lethally nihilistic. This novel leaves me in permanent awe, and permanent mourning."
--Bob Shacochis