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The Devils of "The Deep Green Sea"
By James Busbee
MARCH 2, 1998:
Robert Olen Butler is a writer who has the kind of deserved
success other writers can admire. Butler soldiered through the unrewarding trenches of
literary publishing for years, writing a dozen novels half unpublished
before 1993, when his short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain won the
Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, he published another collection, Tabloid Dreams, one of the best
books of that year. Now comes The Deep Green Sea, a work of elegance and beauty that
combines several of Butlers favorite themes Vietnam, loss, and humans
desperate yearning for connection and meaning.
The novel, set in the streets of present-day Saigon, brings together a former Vietnam
soldier and a young woman born in the midst of the war. Former serviceman Benjamin Cole,
an itinerant trucker fleeing a dead, loveless marriage, returns to the alleys of Saigon
nearly 30 years after his time in country. There he finds Le Thi Tien, a daughter of the
war and now a tourist guide, showing visitors the blasted relics of war. In one another,
Benjamin and Tien find their missing piece, a wholeness that seems too perfect to be true
and is. The story hinges on a somewhat too convenient coincidence, but nonetheless
spirals to a final tragedy worthy of Greek drama.
The grace and complexity with which Butler
draws his two characters is impressive. Tiens attempt to reconcile her new love with
her cultural taboos is heartbreaking; Bens desperate need to close the open ends of
his life is haunting.
For Christs sake, to be able to
start again from a place where theres nothing to remember, nothing to ask about,
nothing but whats there for both of you right in that moment, without any history at
all, thats almost too good to be true, Ben says upon first meeting Tien.
Outside Tiens window, Vietnamese are going around and around all night on
their motorcycles, a bunch of them maybe guys who 20 years ago were in the business of
killing Americans. And she tells me that there is no past at all and she wants me and I
feel like Im going to goddamn cry.
The book doesnt have chapters.
Instead, it alternates between the perspectives of Tien and Ben. The transitions are
smooth, the voices unmistakable. Fiction is the art form of human yearning,
Butler says. The thing I sensed about these characters most strongly was their
yearning. I had two characters who pretty much presented themselves to me at the same
moment, entwined as they are, and so it was the obvious stylistic choice to make.

Robert Olen Butler
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Butler, now a professor of creative writing
at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, served in Vietnam himself. But
from the moment he arrived there, Butler, who served as a military translator, had
experiences different from most of his fellow Americans. I spoke the language
fluently from my first day in country, he says. In Saigon, I lived in an old
French hotel, and I loved to wander the back alleys of Saigon almost every night.
More than two decades later, Butler also
returned to Vietnam. His love for the country had not dimmed. One of the things that
appeals to me about the Vietnamese is their sense of myth and storytelling, Butler
says. Theres an acute consciousness of the duality of life in its sensual
particularities and in an ongoing sense of a spirit world.
The children who were clearly the
sons and daughters of Americans were difficult for us all to understand after the nation
was made one, says Tien, herself the daughter of an American soldier and a Saigon
prostitute. I could keep my American self hidden because it never really existed. It
died with my father even before I was born.
His blood was spilled before I was born
and it spilled from me as well, even in my mothers womb. His blood was gone. But did
my mothers blood fill me in its place? Or am I half a cup full?
Since much of Butlers work, including
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, takes place in Vietnam or involves Vietnamese
people, critics have a tendency to call him a Vietnam writer, much like
Faulkner is a Southern writer. Im a Vietnam novelist in the way
Monet is a lily-pad painter, Butler laughs. For me, Vietnam is simply a
metaphor in which Im able to explore the human condition. Whatever Americans
attitudes are about Vietnam, historically or politically, are of no consequence to me or
my writing.
Still, he confesses some displeasure at the
way America has seemed to reconcile itself with the Vietnam War. We as a nation are
real good winners and pretty awful losers, he says. Many people are anxious
not to even remember it anymore, or reduce it to a crude and simplistic level, like losing
the Super Bowl, and thats too bad.
Newfound recognition in the wake of the
Pulitzer has altered Butlers professional life, and he now spends months at a time
on extended literary tours. As a result, he spends one semester in class, working closely
with his students; the next, he spends on book tours, requiring his students to work on
their own.
And hes a demanding professor.
Art does not come from the mind, it does not come from the rational faculties. Art
comes from the place where you dream, from your unconscious. If you have a story that is
created from the wrong place in the writers head instead of the unconscious
no amount of rewriting or editing or revising is ever going to fix that.
Fundamentally, Butler believes writing is
about courage. To write, you have to have the courage to go into your unconscious,
into the place that is white-hot in the very center of you, and not flinch. Thats
why everybody writes from their head, because its much safer, much easier that
way.
The courage has paid off. Tabloid Dreams
has been optioned by HBO for development as a miniseries. The Deep Green Sea should
solidify Butlers standing at the forefront of contemporary American literature.
Butlers days of literary obscurity just might be through for good.
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