Salvatore Scibona’s exhilarating new novel

The Volunteer. By Salvatore Scibona.Penguin Press; 432 pages; $28. To be published in England by Jonathan Cape in July; £16.99.

A TWO-MINUTE pause on a mountain road is long enough for an American unit to be blown up. As Vollie, short for Volunteer, realises, a convoy’s orders could be distilled to one simple instruction: keep going, even if you get a flat tyre. This mantra shapes his life: “if it obstructs the road you push it off the cliff, don’t matter if your mother’s inside.”

Vollie (a nickname from his childhood on a farm in Iowa) is one of three marines captured in the Cambodian jungle in Salvatore Scibona’s second novel. Their presence beyond the Vietnamese border is illegal, so they do not qualify as prisoners-of-war. In “the tunnel”, as the men call their subterranean prison, Vollie survives by eating his wounded comrades’ food. After his release and recovery in Saigon, he requests a “hard clearing”, meaning his records and identity are erased.

This intricate book spans decades and continents and incorporates multiple, looping stories. Returning to America, Vollie is dispatched to New York as a covert operative for an unnamed agency, with instructions to conduct surveillance on a supposed renegade Nazi. This assignment will haunt him. “The more excellent way is love,” insists a woman whose death Vollie witnesses but feels powerless to prevent. “Any one person is a grounds for love if you pick him,” his old friend Bobby tells him. “You have to pick him is the thing.” At a commune in New Mexico, where he washes up after New York, Vollie falls for Louisa, Bobby’s ex, and brings up her son, setting in train another of the book’s tales.

A searing record of war and the lies people live by, “The Volunteer” is also a map of an alternative America, populated by men sleeping on the beds of trucks and women scrounging cigarettes and beer. Along the way Mr Scibona explores the process of forgetting, the longing to be singled out for love and the price of saying “no” when you want to say “yes”. He is as adept at conjuring memorable images and sensations as in conveying his themes: a wind rolling off a bay and smelling of molasses, an empty mailbox filled only with sunlight.

Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high. “Who among us”, Vollie asks, “has lived only once?”