Those Opulent Days

Pham debuts with a memorable and disturbing historical set in French-occupied Vietnam. In 1918, four wealthy boys—native Annamites Duy, Phong, and Minh, and Frenchman Edmond—steal away from their boarding school to visit a fortune teller who warns that one of them will die by poison. A decade later, after the boys have grown into formidable businessmen, one of them dies such a death, at a debaucherous party in an extravagant Dalat mansion. From there, the narrative splinters, with flashbacks from each protagonist’s perspective buttressed by recollections from their employees, lovers, and mothers that give gradual context to the central tragedy. What emerges is less a traditional mystery than a bleak portrait of life under colonization, with special focus on the ill treatment of women and animals by elites, and the spiritual hopelessness that saturates their ranks: even Phong, the most brilliant and promising of the friends, abandons his studies to smoke Duy’s family’s opium and pursue a doomed love affair with Edmond. Pham’s prose is lyrical, and her evocation of the period immersive, but the sprawling cast means some secondary characters don’t quite come to life. Still, this is a tense and unique dispatch from a key period in Vietnamese history. Agent: Danya Kukafka, Trellis Literary. (Nov.)