Volume 40, Number 14 · August 12, 1993
Far from Saigon
By Robert Towers
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
by Robert Olen Butler
Penguin, 249 pp., $10.00 (paper)
The dark horse winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize, a writer named Robert Olen Butler had, it turned out, published six little-noticed novels, with subjects ranging from the war in Vietnam to atomic tests in Los Alamos and labor unrest in a Depression-era steel town. To judge from the two most recent, this comparative neglect is not surprising. Wabash, his Depression novel published in 1987, pits the decent characters (the workers) against the bad (the mill owner and his foreman) in so simplified a way that one can almost imagine it as a boy's book from the 1930s—except for the ending, in which the hero, who is saved at the last minute by his loving wife from murdering the boss, recovers from the impotence that has plagued him since the death of his little girl. The Deuce (1989), I am afraid, is an equally sentimental and melodramatic book, in which a dirty-talking half-Vietnamese boy recounts his experience in the fetid world of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Forty-second Street. Neither work prepares the reader for the originality or the sheer oddity of the best pieces in his collection of stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
Review, 2212 words
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