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Summary
Summary
From one of America's most important writers, Perfume River is an exquisite novel that examines family ties and the legacy of the Vietnam War through the portrait of a single North Florida family.
Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian, teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's own family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. Robert and Jimmy's father, a veteran of WWII, is coming to the end of his life, and aftershocks of war ripple across their lives once again, when Jimmy refuses to appear at his father's bedside. And an unstable homeless man whom Robert at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.
Author Notes
Robert Olen Butler is a novelist, screenwriter, educator, and short-story writer who grew up in Granite City, Illinois.
Butler served in Vietnam. Following the Vietnam War, Butler began writing. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and The Saturday Review, as well as in four annual editions of the Best American Short Stories and six annual editions of New Stories of the South. A collection of his stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler's novels include The Alleys of Eden, Countrymen of Bones, and Sun Dogs. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Butler also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at McNeese State University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Butler's assured, elegant novel explores a family fractured by the Vietnam War as its members face the losses of age. In 1967, Robert Quinlan enlists, hoping to secure a noncombatant role in Vietnam, while his younger brother, Jimmy, cuts family ties after his father violently rebukes his antiwar stance. While dining out in Tallahassee, Fla., 47 years later, Robert-now 70 and a university professor-meets a mentally ill homeless man, also named Bob, whom he takes for a Vietnam veteran. He is wrong, but the encounter reawakens memories of the Tet Offensive, when a split-second decision burdened Robert with secrets and guilt. The day after the encounter, Robert's father, William, shatters his hip, and Jimmy, a resident of Canada since his flight to avoid the draft, is told of William's uncertain prognosis. As the brothers and those around them face the possibility of a reunion, they look at their relationships anew; meanwhile, an increasingly delusional Bob crosses paths with the family again. The novel has obvious links to Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, but its characters struggle to adapt to the dislocations caused not by war or geography but by time. Eddying fluidly through its half-century span, the book speaks eloquently of the way the past bleeds into the present, history reverberates through individual lives, and mortality challenges our perceptions of ourselves and others. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Life has a way of slipping by when we're not looking. Secrets stay hidden, slowly eroding the truth between people, and then, again and again, we fail to act, further solidifying the barriers that keep us from one another and from ourselves. So it is in Butler's latest novel, a deeply meditative reflection on aging and love, as seen through the prism of one family quietly torn asunder by the lingering effects of the Vietnam War. Robert is a 70-year-old academic, and his wife, Darla, also a professor, is 67; over decades, their lives have drifted into the sameness of routine, intimacy inadvertently discarded like old skin. Robert is a Vietnam vet, but his experience in the war and his secrecy about what happened to him there as well as unresolved questions about his motivation for enlisting continue to haunt him, as do his troubled relationships with his father, who dies just as the story begins, and his brother, who evaded the draft and has lived in Canada ever since. Years of secrecy and avoidance come to a head in the course of the novel, with a homeless man whom Robert encounters in a restaurant providing the catalyst. Butler, returning to contemporary literary fiction after three outstanding historical thrillers, shows again that he is a master of tone, mood, and character, whatever genre he chooses to explore. This is thoughtful, introspective fiction of the highest caliber, but it carries a definite edge, thanks to an insistent backbeat that generates suspense with the subtlest of brushstrokes.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER is a restless writer. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," he presented the Vietnam War through the voices of Vietnamese emigrants living in Louisiana. In his novels "They Whisper" and "The Deep Green Sea," he delved into sensual Vietnam memories from an American military man's point of view. Some of his fiction delights in constraints; one extreme case is the collection "Severance," which toys with the idea that, after decapitation, the human mind has about 90 seconds of consciousness left to it. Butler figured that meant 240 words' worth, and compiled 62 stories at exactly that length. His new novel, however, plays it straight. Though compact, the book ranges widely in time and setting to trace the effects of war - primarily the Vietnam conflict - on several generations of a New Orleans family. Butler's Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. "Perfume River" hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity. It tells the story of the Quinlan brothers: the 70-year-old Florida State University history professor Robert, who tried to please his World War II veteran father, William, by enlisting in the Army in 1967 and going to Vietnam ; and the 68-year-old Jimmy, who, reviling the war and falling out violently with his dad, headed to Canada to live his life on his own terms. Close to 50 years later, in 2015, William is on his death bed and the estrangements in the family are tested. Can Jimmy, who has stayed incommunicado all these years, really keep away? Are there any filial connections left to work with? The novel's title refers to the river in Hue where Robert was pulled into pleasures and perils he has never shared with anyone. But the book has as much to do with feeling too damn old to deal with your problematic elderly parents as it does with specific Vietnam legacies. The brothers' Irish Catholic mother, Peggy - always needy, and now legitimately overwrought by her husband's crisis - is as much of a handful as their cantankerous father. In Butler's sly portrayal, Peggy's manipulative insistence on her woes leaves her blind to how she strikes others. Of course, a family in its later stages also includes the spouses and offspring of its grown children. Butler's particulars on the two brothers' marriages are comprehensively adroit. Robert and his wife, Darla, a fellow academic, are anchored in an almost-too-quiet routine; their careful consideration for each other has raised a barrier between them. Jimmy and his wife, with their discreetly open marriage, face different challenges. A central factor in the book is the presence of a homeless man, Bob, who becomes a menacing mirror to Robert after being bought a meal by him. BUTLER'S prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don't extend just to his characters' traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he's addressing. (The late 1960s, in Jimmy's recollection, were "an era of militant gentleness, judgmental tolerance.") Truth-telling designed to devastate and secrets that, if revealed, might destroy one relationship, even as they clear the air for another, are all in complex play here. "You share a war in one way," Robert thinks. "You pass it on in another." "Perfume River" captures both the agony and subtlety of how that happens. MICHAEL UPCHURCH, the author of "Passive Intruder" and other novels, was the staff book critic for The Seattle Times from 1998 to
Library Journal Review
This latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain) astutely reveals the Vietnam War's continuing impact on America through two families: that of protagonist Robert Quinlan, who served in Vietnam to please a World War II-proud father estranged from his second son, war protester Jimmy, and that of Bob, a homeless man haunted by his violent father, himself troubled by Vietnam. -Robert, whose marriage is strained, had a desk job during the war and remains conscience-stricken owing to a single act of brutality he cannot bring himself to discuss. (Vietnam has left him with other, more personal secrets as well.) Perhaps that explains why he befriends Bob, whom he initially believes to be a Vietnam veteran. The increasingly unstable Bob figures largely in the narrative after the death of Robert's father, even as Robert is further ground down by his father's dying revelations. Meanwhile, Jimmy, who fled to Canada in the Sixties and remains there, resolutely out of touch with his family, suddenly has choices of his own to make. By the end of this pristinely written novel, we come to see what war does to everyone. -VERDICT A complex story told with poignancy and an economy of means; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/16.]-Barbara -Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.