Perfume River

July 25, 2016
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.

July 1, 2016
Two brothers, ages 68 and 70, revisit their lives as their father lies dying.The book's events cover one week, during which World War II veteran William Quinlan dies and his two sons, Robert and Jimmy, meet for the first time in decades. The sons' lives have gone in wildly different directions: Jimmy broke ties with his family and went to Canada in the 1960s, choosing a bohemian life as a leather crafter and an open marriage. Robert went to Vietnam in an attempt to win his father's approval. Now a college professor, he remains haunted by memories of the one soldier he killed and the Vietnamese girlfriend he never saw again; his marriage has gone emotionally stagnant. Both marriages reach crisis points in the week of William's death, and both sons begin to resolve emotional issues left hanging since the Vietnam years. Meanwhile, Robert is headed toward a potentially violent confrontation he doesn't see coming thanks to a chance encounter with an unhinged homeless man who has war-related scars of his own. Though this subplot adds suspense, the book's resonance comes from the two sons' struggles to make peace with their histories. The climactic scene, Robert's conversation with his father on his deathbed, is devastating and beautifully written. Butler (The Empire of Night, 2014, etc.) risks taking on too many weighty themes for one novel: the shadow of Vietnam, the push and pull of father-son relationships, the pitfalls of long-term marriages, and the psychic toll of aging. But with some compelling characters, Butler pulls it all together into a story that's both complex and meaningful.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
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 thereas well as unresolved questions about his motivation for enlistingcontinue 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2016

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2016

The Vietnam War is still with us, as evidenced by this latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain). Robert Quinlan and wife Darla, tenured professors stressing over their marriage, met during protests against the war, and Robert's brother Jimmy became estranged from the family at the time. Even as his World War II veteran father lies dying, Jimmy refuses to seek reconciliation. Meanwhile, Robert has befriended a homeless man he thinks is a Vietnam vet. Look for Butler at LJ's Day of Dialog.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2016

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.