Across the Perfume River

Over the Moat:

Love Among the Ruins

of Imperial Vietnam

By James Sullivan

Picador, 354 pp., paperback, $15

We know the outcome at the outset. This Romeo will win his Juliet, whisking her over the threshold not of a hotel bridal suite but of that separating the Third World from the First, taking her from Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam and the base of French colonial government (and site of the 1968 battle waged by US Marines), to Quincy, his boyhood home.

For the storyteller, however, as for the seasoned traveler, destination is merely a structural element, a necessary one, to be sure -- think of Jack Kerouac's interminable Pong-ing from coast to coast and the slack storytelling thereby engendered -- but destination is only an element. It's the trip through time, space, and self that matters for writers, readers, and travelers. And it's on this trip that James Sullivan takes his reader, in ''Over the Moat," his first book and the near-perfect nonfiction account of his courtship of Thuy, a young Vietnamese woman. ''You walk through life thinking you know where you're going," Sullivan writes, ''and then a leg is stuck out, you trip, and when you get back up you're heading somewhere else."

This particular leg is stuck out midway through a bicycle trip up Vietnam's Highway 1, which runs the coast from Saigon to Hanoi. In Hue, Sullivan and his friend David Relin are invited to tea at the family home of Thuy and her sister, Minh. Sullivan's description and characterization are deft and sure, and his dialogue crackles, carrying always an emotional subtext. He is especially good when it comes to the small, endearing grammatical flaws that sprinkle Thuy's English, but he includes as well the grosser errors that result when he essays Vietnamese. We understand perfectly why Sullivan returns to the house alone the next night, asking at the end of the evening if he might meet Thuy again, at a cafe -- the following day, if possible. He's smitten but on a tight schedule. The plan is to finish pedaling to Hanoi, return to Saigon by train, and fly to Koh Pi Pi, Thailand, for a week of sun, during which he and Relin will hammer out a travel article for Bicycling magazine.

But Thuy is busy. Perhaps another time. The following day, he stops at the shop where she works to inquire about the next day. Busy again. He gets the message, closes his eyes, nods. As he hoists himself onto his bicycle, she calls to him, using his name for the first time. ''Jim . . . when you have some free time, you may come to my house to play."

When the bike trip is over, Sullivan bails on Koh Pi Pi and returns to Hue, arriving in time to celebrate the Tet New Year with Thuy's family. As elsewhere, Sullivan's sense of pacing and balance is finely calibrated. He gives us a taste of the cuisine, but he doesn't overdo it: Thuy ''lifted the lid off the dessert dish, segmented with sugared flakes of ginger, candied lotus, watermelon seeds, and small Thai hard candy. She sampled a piece of ginger and then gave one to me. The flake sizzled a moment like a hot tamale but quickly lost potency. 'Do you feel delicious?' she asked."

Sullivan takes a room in a hotel across the Perfume River from Thuy's family, who lives inside the walls of the imperial citadel. He stays two months, pedaling the same route to her house every night across the Perfume River, over the moat that he reflects ''was meant to keep out invaders." All told, the book covers these two months, his return to the States, and the subsequent year in Hue, tracing a voyage of discovery that encompasses self and other -- and the other in the self.

It's 1993. The US trade embargo is still in place, stoking the antagonists, which mass on the horizon like angry storm clouds. There are a host of Vietnamese suitors. There are the war and its aftermath, and the suspicion that Sullivan is CIA. There are officious bureaucrats, Vietnamese and American. There's the phenomenon that a drifting former Marine dubs ''the F-U-O . . . the fever of unknown origin." There's the language barrier, itself a short shadow drawing the eye toward the monolith of cultural difference. There's self-doubt, questions of motive and identity. Sullivan must wonder whether this is love or an effect of atmosphere, the intoxication of one more American in close proximity to the Perfume River. Thinking about his reasons for leaving after two months in Hue, he writes, ''I knew that's why I was going home. . . . Because I didn't trust myself. Because I was going over a moat every night to visit the granddaughter of a mandarin, and because I couldn't straighten out the line between what was real and what was storybook."

Back in the States, Sullivan's family and friends do their best to submerge him in the mainstream of American life, wake him up. And here, Sullivan lightly works the possibilities of coincidence and metaphor like a man walking west to east on a tightrope. Driving north on his way to a friend's wedding, he crosses the Tobin Bridge and recalls how ''as children we'd come north this way on summer vacation every year, a week away that held much more promise when we knew we were leaving the city by spanning this river. And not only a river, but a river that rose and twisted through places so fantastic they'd had to name it the Mystic." And then he reminds us that north of the city you're on Route 1. These lovers' stars are not crossed; they're aligned.

The book is a masterful blend of travelogue, love story, memoir, and cultural anthropology, with a dash of guidebook and phrasebook thrown in. Let's face it, the fairy-tale romance is no longer enough. We want entire lives with the structure and resonance of fiction. In ''Over the Moat," Sullivan delivers two and more such lives. Ten years from now, I hope to read the sequel to this book, the flip side, the States-side, the return, the dis-Orientation. In the interim, I'll settle for any story Sullivan wants to tell.

David Thoreen is chair of the English Department at Assumption College, in Worcester. His most recent poems have appeared in The Journal and Slate.