With Linh’s help, Helen finds that Vietnam, a place she once considered “backward,” has become home. She has “slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country” only to grow uneasy with her identity as a war photographer who has gone native. She finds it “such a cliché to expose the war, or even wanting to test one’s self against it,” yet she risks her life to capture images of the violence around her, sure that “the sacrifice had been worth it.” Helen’s restlessness and grappling, her realization that “a woman sees war differently,” provide a new and fascinating perspective on Vietnam. Vivid battle scenes, sensual romantic entanglements and elegant writing add to the pleasures of “The Lotus Eaters.”

Image Saigon, 1975. Credit... Nik Wheeler/Corbis

Soli’s hallucinatory vision of wartime Vietnam seems at once familiar and new. The details — the scorched villages, the rancid smells of Saigon — arise naturally, underpinning the novel’s sharp realism and characterization. In an author’s note, Soli writes that she’s been an “eager reader of every book” about Vietnam she has come across, but she is never overt or heavy-handed. Nothing in this novel seems “researched.” Rather, its disparate sources have been smoothed and folded into Soli’s own distinct voice.

Still, readers familiar with writing about Vietnam might recognize models for Soli’s characters among the flesh-and-blood photojournalists of the war — Sean Flynn, Henri Huet, Catherine Leroy and Dickey Chapelle, the first American female war correspondent to die in action. Chapelle, with her signature Australian bush hat, fatigues and pearl earrings, covered the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa for National Geographic, was captured and jailed for more than a month during the Hungarian uprising and arrived in Vietnam in the early ’60s. In her 1962 book “What’s a Woman Doing Here?” Chapelle writes of her work as a correspondent: “They were stories, yes. Telling them fed me, yes. But their substance was not innocent. I had become an interpreter of violence.”

Like Chapelle, Helen is acutely ambivalent about her moral position as a war journalist. She is intent on pondering whether those who represent war — through reporting or photography — are doing anything but replicating the violence they depict. Does war journalism change public opinion, or does it merely lead, as one photojournalist in “The Lotus Eaters” asks, to “a steady loss of impact until violence becomes meaningless”? Do gruesome images of war foster revulsion and opposition to violence on the part of the public, or do the images simply translate into war porn?

Soli doesn’t offer simple answers to these questions, but leaves her characters in a state of discomfort about their work. After getting an “incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child; a real tearjerker,” the journalists would turn away from one another with “a kind of postcoital shame.” Helen finds that “in the face of real tragedy, they were unreal, vultures; they were all about getting product. In their worst moments, each of them feared being a kind of macabre Hollywood, and it was only in terms of the future that they regained their dignity, became dubious heroes.” Yet Helen believes in the redemptive power of her work. Indeed, she believes that “every good war picture is an antiwar picture.” When accused of being a mere tourist of the war, she is chagrined by the realization that her early months in-country were a charade, a time when she had played at war, when “the whole country had merely served as backdrop for her adventure.”