“I have no hatred in me.”
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler offers a wonderful short story collection that explores the complexities of the Vietnamese-American experience. It’s a beautiful, slightly sentimental short story collection about Vietnamese-American refugees and immigrants who come to terms with their fragmented cultural identity as both Vietnamese and American. Each of the stories is unique and complex, and the characters are vividly-imagined, rejecting caricature and giving voice to an often overlooked group in American society. Of course looming over the stories is the shadow of the Vietnam War. Many of these stories were originally published in different publications like The Missouri Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Cimarron Review, Writer’s Forum, Hawaii Review, Icarus, Colorado Review, The New Orleans Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Sewanee Review, New England Review, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and others.
Many of the characters in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain find themselves caught between two worlds, from the Mekong Delta to the Louisiana Bayou. They are often Catholic, living around New Orleans, and wrestling with their identity as both Vietnamese and American, traditional and modern, Catholic and ancestral. From age-old tales of the mythological Trung sisters, who were instrumental in the creation of the national identity of Vietnam, to the modern Catholic stories of saints and Church figures, the characters in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain face very real tension at the center of two cultures. Butler’s meticulously crafts these characters so as to deliberately avoid any hint of one-dimensional racial stereotyping. And in so doing, he shows their humanity.
I’m sure there are some contemporary reviewers who would be all-too-eager to criticize A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain for being written by a white man. After all, how can a white man accurately depict the inner lives of Vietnamese people? While I sometimes think this brand of literary criticism comes from a genuine place of caring, more often than not I find that it is misplaced. Examining literature through a purely sociological lens has become something of a cliché in recent decades and it tends to enforce an absurd racial standard for writers: namely that only white people can write books about white people, and that only Vietnamese people can write books about Vietnamese people and so on. It reduces the literary imagination to mere racial identity. In the past, there were other Pulitzer Prize winners who crossed this sometimes treacherous racial boundary (see The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron) but here Robert Olen Butler accomplishes it with consideration and care, giving it the solicitousness it deserves. I suppose if a Vietnamese person were to seriously critique the merits or accuracy of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain I would be interested to hear their perspective. I looked around to see if I could find critical review of the book from a Vietnamese lens, perhaps attacking Butler for misrepresenting the Vietnamese experience, but I did not find any.
Now with that out of the way, it seems to me that many books addressing Vietnam and the Vietnam War are told from the perspective of American soldiers and the myriad dilemmas they faced: violence, injury, PTSD, loss of friendship, loss of humanity, the struggle to readjust to civilian life, and so on. But few narratives actually capture the perspective of Vietnamese people. And Butler does feature a couple stories of American soldiers and veterans in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, the collection is primarily about Vietnamese civilians, many of whom are refugees in America reflecting on their home country –the loss of culture, the painful memories of childhood, and a newfound hope in America. This is neither a jingoistic defense nor a moral condemnation of the Vietnam War. It is rather an examination of Vietnamese people whose lives were permanently altered by the legacy of the war.
Originally there were fifteen stories in this collection, but in later editions two more stories were added: “Salem” and “Missing,” both of which strike me as welcome additions to the collection. And while I found this entire collection to be deeply penetrating and emotionally gripping, for me the most powerful stories are: “Open Arms,” a story about an older Vietnamese man living in New Orleans who recalls his time working as a translator for the Australians during the Vietnam War when a questionably trustworthy Viet Cong defector suddenly arrived; “Fairy Tale,” the story of a Vietnamese bargirl and prostitute named Miss Noi who emigrates to the United States and eventually finds love; “Mid-Autumn,” which depicts an imagined conversation between a pregnant Vietnamese mother and her unborn daughter; “In The Clearing,” which is a letter from a former Vietnamese soldier who explains how he was forced to flee Vietnam to his son whom he has never met; “A Ghost Story,” a magical realist story about a man who is saved from a Viet Cong ambush by the ghost of a young Vietnamese woman; “Snow,” a charming Christmas love story between a Vietnamese waitress and an older Jewish man; and the titular story ‘A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” which is about the ghost of Ho Chi Minh who visits an old friend on his deathbed.
In “Open Arms” we are introduced to a Vietnamese interpreter who works for the Australians in their base camp near Nui Dat, though his home village is far away near Pleiku. Writing from a long time in the future after relocating to Louisiana, he recalls how he was married at the time before his wife left him for a “cripple.” “I have no hatred in me,” he says as he recalls the story of picking up a defector named Dang Van Thập (pronounced “Tup”) whose whole family was killed by the North Vietnamese communists. Initially worried Thập might be a “ghost” (per his village superstitions), the narrator has a dramatic conversation with Thập in which we wonder if Thập can be trusted. He seems to be a “true believer” but at the very least, we learn that he deeply misses his wife who has been killed by the Viet Cong. Defections like this are being encouraged under a Vietnamese government program that was known as “Open Arms” (hence the title of the story) but the very concept of “Open Arms” forces us to question what it means to accept someone with “open arms” while at the same time trampling on their customs and traditions.
Then the Australians take Thập and our narrator into a tent to see a pornographic film which deeply shakes the moral compass of them both. In fact, their passions are roused as they stick around and watch nine such films with the Australians, while both Vietnamese men are shocked by Western vulgarity and they miss their wives. That night, Thập murders one of the two infantry officers before shooting himself in the head. The Vietnamese narrator reflects on this act years later, sitting in his apartment in Louisiana where he works at a bank and practices Buddhism. He comments on the rift between Vietnamese in Louisiana over their competing conception of American freedom, and yet men like the narrator have allowed themselves to be subsumed by American culture, reading magazines with naked smiling women. Still, sometimes he spends his evenings in silence, thinking about Thập, and he has no hatred in his heart.
In “Mr. Green” a 41-year-old Vietnamese woman living in Versailles, New Orleans reflects on her upbringing in Vietnam –being raised by Catholic parents while her grandfather still practiced the old ways of ancestor worship. She talks about wanting to be like her mother, visiting the market with her and learning how to twist birds’ necks, kill them, and prep them to be eaten. She tells the story of her grandfather’s eccentric parrot named “Mr. Green” who often speaks in the voice of her grandfather and repeats his colloquial phrases like “what then?” And when her grandfather dies, she inherits Mr. Green and brings him with her to the United States where she settles in Louisiana. In time, Mr. Green grows old, plucks his own feathers, and starts to cough just like her grandfather on his deathbed. The figure of Mr. Green serves as a bridge between her ancestral past in Vietnam and her Catholic future in America.
“The Trip Back” follows Kánh, a Catholic Vietnamese-American “blunt” businessman, who travels from Lake Charles, Louisiana to Houston, Texas to pick up his wife’s grandfather, Mr. Chinh, who has been living in communist Vietnam for the past thirteen years. Mr. Chinh has finally agreed to emigrate to the United States and live with his granddaughter’s family. Awaiting his arrival, Kánh’s wife, Mai, is filled with a flood of childhood memories, especially riding around on her grandfather’s back, but when Kánh arrives at the airport, a cousin named Hương quickly shepherds Mr. Chinh off the plane and into Kánh’s care before sharing that he (Hương) immediately plans to fly back to Vietnam. Kánh suspects something is wrong with Mr. Chinh. His suspicions are soon confirmed on the drive home when Mr. Chinh wants only to talk about different types of cars and he emphatically states he never had a granddaughter. Mr. Chinh has no memory of his daughter past a certain age. He appears to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. When they arrive home, Kánh fears for what has brought into his household as his wife starts sobbing when her grandfather does not recognize her. The story concludes as Kánh lovingly takes Mai on his back and carries her around just as her grandfather had once done. Kánh realizes he is no longer comfortable with the “old ways” as he takes a dreamy trip back to the South China Sea on a metaphorical “trip back” to the Vietnamese culture he has left behind.
In “Fairy Tale” Robert Olen Butler vividly imagines the voice and character of a Vietnamese woman named Miss Noi. She works as a “blossom” bargirl in Saigon where she meets many “cowboy” GIs and she loves the rare treat of eating apples when she can, until one day a man from the embassy promises to marry her. He takes her from Saigon to the United States in 1974 where she lives the life of a housewife with a “toaster machine and a vacuum cleaner.” But she is particularly drawn to his cryptic Vietnamese expression “the sunburnt duck is lying down” which simply turns out to be a mistranslation (he was actually intending to say “May Vietnam live for ten thousand years”). But since Miss Noi is enamored with Western fairy tales as a way to help her learn English (particularly the prepositional distinction between “Once upon a time” and “Once up on a time”), and filled with ancient cultural tales about ducks in Vietnam, she endeavors to get to the bottom of this parable of the duck.
However, when Miss Noi realizes she has settled down with a bad man, she leaves him and his home in Atlanta. She relocates to Bourbon Street in New Orleans where she dances naked as a “voodoo girl” and works as a prostitute (though as a Catholic, she subtly tells readers that she has a moral justification for herself as she struggles with questions like “what do I know about men anymore?”). In time, she meets a kind man named Mr. Fontenot who says she is “beautiful.” They make love and soon Mr. Fontenot shows up in a suit and proposes to Miss Noi with an apple. They move to Thibodaux, Louisiana together as Miss Noi has finally found her own “fairy tale.”
“Crickets” is the story of Thiệu (or “Ted”), a Vietnamese chemical engineer who works at a refinery. He was eighteen years old when Saigon fell, and now he lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana with his ten-year-old son “Bill” who is bored on vacation. Ted tells his son about his own youthful experiences growing up in Vietnam and catching crickets in the Mekong Delta, a region which bears a similar climate to that of New Orleans. But when they try to catch crickets together, his son Bill is far more worried about dirtying up his Reebok shoes than catching any crickets. Ted decides to let the cricket-catching expedition go as he realizes his son’s childhood will be uniquely American, not Vietnamese.
In “Letters from my Father” Fran discovers a package of letters from her father kept in a storage shack. Francine “Fran” is the daughter of an American man and a Vietnamese mother. In the letters, her father explains how Fran and her mother got out of Vietnam and how he angrily wrote to the government to protect them. He also recounts the painful story of a little girl who prays to a shadow of her father in Vietnam, hoping he will return, but when her father finally comes home, his daughter vociferously claims he is not her father. This leads him to wrongly believe that his wife has been unfaithful. He then leaves and she throws herself into the river, killing herself. And when he learns the truth –that his daughter merely confused a shadow with her father– he takes his daughter to his mother’s house and likewise kills himself, as well.
“Lovers” is about a small Vietnamese man who is often called a “wimp.” He is a former Vietnamese spy for the U.S. Air Force. Back in Vietnam he was once capable of bringing “fire from heaven” to destroy key targets. He explains that he is married to a beautiful “butterfly” wife named Bướm: “it is a terrible thing to be married to a beautiful woman.” She is loved by many Vietnamese men, and keeps her blouse unbuttoned, inviting the attention of many suitors. In response, the narrator sometimes uses his connections in the Air Force to murder the men who sleep with his wife. He calls it the “curse of the small man.” He believes the world is full of struggle and you have to be clever to survive
Eventually, he escapes Vietnam with Bướm and two children and they settle down in Gretna, Louisiana near the Mississippi River where things remain calm until one day, his wife is secretly courted by a man who owns Vietnamese restaurant. Our narrator is understandably irate (interestingly he never seems to confront his wife over it), but since he no longer has the power of the U.S. Air Force behind him, he must find other means of destroying the restaurant owner. He visits a voodoo priest named Dr. Joseph who amusingly gives him the task of filling a hog bladder with the shit of a “she goat,” a vial of blood, and a clip of his wife’s hair. He is then told to toss the bladder over the offending man’s house.
He is given three chances to deny Bướm, but he declines the opportunity. And in the hilarious conclusion, when the narrator tries to do the deed, the bladder gets stuck in a tree, and when he climbs up it, the man comes out of the house flanked by our narrator’s beautiful wife Bướm. Instead, the narrator snatches the bladder and throws it at the man, but falls out the tree and winds up in the hospital. His wife then suddenly has newfound respect for him. She tends to him and wants to hear him talk about the issues facing Vietnamese people in America.
“Mid-Autumn” is the imagined conversation between mother and her child in the womb. It touches upon what is customary for Vietnamese women, and traditions in Vietnam for pregnancy and marriage. She describes how she met her husband at the “Mid-Autumn” festival, which takes place on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, and the overlap with the Chinese tradition of lighting a paper lantern. But she also recounts the sad story about her first love who died in the army in Vietnam. She now lives in America where she is having a little daughter.
“In the Clearing” bears some similarities to “Mid-Autumn” in that both stories involve a parent writing to their child. In “In the Clearing,” a man is writing a sad somber letter to his son he has never met. He recalls how he was forced to flee Saigon when it fell, and now he lives in New Orleans. Years later, he does not remember all of his military experience, but he does clearly remember being in a “clearing” where he and his compatriots discussed a fairy tale before they were attacked and he was unknowingly taken away into the South China Sea, never to see Vietnam again. It marked the end of his childhood. He left his homeland against his will. Now his son has a new father back in Vietnam as his mother remarried. In the letter, he tells is son the same fairy tale about a dragon and a princess, whose children become the founders of Vietnam (a story his father told to him). He wishes for his son to save his life.
“A Ghost Story” is a magical realist tale told by late middle-aged, shabby, “oriental” man on a greyhound bus to Beloxi where he sees his daughter once a month. He tells a ‘true’ story in Vietnam in the central highlands in 1971 wherein a Vietnamese Army major named Trung went to be with his lover one night, but when driving away, he was fired upon and veered off the road until he spotted a beautiful woman in the mountains. At first, he fears it might be a trick by the Viet Cong or a “strange narcotic fantasy,” but either way this hallucination saves him from an ambush ahead. When he awakes, he realizes he has been unconscious for two hours. Upon finding his fellow soldiers were all massacred, he tries to track down this mysterious woman who saved him. Her name is Nguyen thi Linh of the street called Lotus in An Khe, but when he arrives at the address, he learns that she died four years ago. He later revisits the spot where she found him, and when she reappears again, she grows large and her tongue becomes bulbous and swallows him up. The major’s brother told this story to the old man narrating the story and showed him a photograph of the woman. The old man then spotted the ghostly woman one day in Saigon. Miss Linh saved him, as well, just as Saigon was falling. She helped him get all the way to the embassy and into an important car that takes him away to America. As he drives off, he looks back just long enough to see her huge tongue, because he realizes she had also eaten him up.
“Snow” is the charming cross-cultural Christmas love story about a Vietnamese woman who works as a waitress at a Louisiana Chinese restaurant. She is 34 years old and unmarried (mother is sad for her not having a husband). One day on Christmas Eve, a Jewish widower named Mr. Cohen arrives in the restaurant for a pick-up order. They get to talking about their mutual fear of snow. For the woman, she fell asleep in a restaurant in St. Louis and woke up to see snow which scared her. Mr. Cohen, a lawyer, explains his own fear of snow. He was born in Poland but his father sent him his mother away to England when he was young. He distinctly remembers driving away in the snow, the last memory he has of his father who presumably died in the Holocaust. Mr. Cohen politely asks if he can call the Vietnamese waitress sometime, and so begins their budding romance.
In “Relic” a wealthy Vietnamese man owns one of John Lennon’s shoes that he died in. The man was wealthy in Vietnam before “the spineless poor threw down their guns and let the communists take over.” He came to New Orleans, Louisiana, to live in a community called Versailles with other Vietnamese refugees, while his family remained back in Vietnam. He is enamored with relics and artifacts and the stories they tell. He had many such things back in Saigon. This story contrasts the Catholic tradition of relic-ownership with traditional Vietnamese religious icons. He looks for a place to belong as he places John Lennon’s shoe on his foot (with almost sacred intention) and he endeavors to find the other missing shoe.
“Preparation” is about a Vietnamese woman whose best friend Thuy has died of ovarian cancer. As her body lies in the “preparation room,” she recalls all her years of jealousy over Thuy’s beauty and her secret infatuation for Thuy’s husband, Le Van Ly. The narrator lives in Versailles, New Orleans (her husband died in the Vietnam War). Thuy’s final dying request was for her friend to use her skilled hands to make her beautiful one last time for the casket. The narrator expresses complicated feelings of sadness and resentment over her best friend’s beauty, even in death.
Far and away the longest story in the collection, “The American Couple” is about a Vietnamese couple, Gabrielle and Vinh, who win a trip to Puerto Vallarta on the gameshow “Let’s Make a Deal.” This story explores the clash of cultures as they encounter a white American couple, Frank and Eileen Davies, and very quickly Frank and Vinh strike up a lightly uncomfortable relationship over their shared military experience in Vietnam. There is much talk of movies and television shows, and contrasts between the traditions involving ducks in Vietnam contra the absurd American television show which required them to wear a duck suit costume, as well as scenes of parachuting, before the two couples agree to jointly visit the old set of the Hollywood movie “The Night of the Iguana” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. However, while visiting this campy fake set, the two men (Frank and Vinh) seem to be re-enacting something serious from the war, they argue and play a mock war games scenario with each other using rocks. The situation only ends when they start fighting. Gabrielle wonders what has come into her husband. Later that night, she surprisingly catches Vinh parachuting over the ocean, a symbol of escape and freedom.
In the titular story “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” an elder perhaps ghostly Ho Chi Minh (with hands covered in sugar) visits a very old man who is dying named Dao. Dao once knew Ho Chi Minh as a young man. They were best friends when they worked at the Carlton Hotel in London together. Then Ho Chi Minh was known as Nguyen Ai Quoc (the narrator was a dishwasher in the hotel, while Ho was pastry cook). He explains to Ho that he converted to Buddhism in Paris, much to Ho’s chagrin, and he talks about the maintenance of the spirit, the four characters meaning “a good scent from a strange mountain.” The elder man apparently overhears of his son and grandson involved in a political killing and he tells Ho about it.
Here the collection originally ended before “Salem” and “Missing” were added in later editions. “Salem” follows a Vietnamese Viet Cong assassin in the jungle. He once found a lone American man separated from his colleagues and killed the man with a handmade grenade from a soda can. He then took his belongings, but all he found was a pack of Salem cigarettes. He smoked one as a release (the favorite cigarette of Ho Chi Minh), but he decided to keep the Salem cigarettes for himself –he has never taken another cigarette out of it. The cigarette case has the photo of a woman on the front of it, the photo was deliberately cut to match the shape of the cigarette case. Now, with the war over, the Vietnamese reports to the communist government four times per year on the development of his community. However, he looks at the photograph of the wife of a man he once killed, and reflects upon it with sacred reverence. He once realized that the man whom he killed was poor, just like him, as evidenced by the fact that he was keeping half-smoked cigarettes in his pack. The Vietnamese man smokes the other half of the partly smoked cigarete from the man he killed.
“Missing” is about an American deserter who has stayed in a small Vietnam village after the war and married a Vietnamese woman and had a daughter. But one day, he is alarmed to spot a French photograph of his face in a newspaper titled “Missing.” Because of this, he fears being caught and having to leave Vietnam.
Notable Quotations
“I have no hatred in me” (9, from “Open Arms”).
“This man had been my sworn enemy till a week ago. The others in this room had been my friends. But Thập was my countryman in some deeper way. And it had nothing to do with his being Vietnamese, either. I knew what was happening inside him. He was desiring his wife, just as I was desiring mine. Except on that night I thought I would one day be with my wife again, and his was newly dead” (23, from “Open Arms”).
“Thập was a true believer, and that night he felt that he had suddenly understood the democracies he was trying to believe in. He felt that the communists whom he had rightly broken with, who had killed his wife and shown him their own fatal flaw, nevertheless had been right about all the rest of us. The fact that the impurity of the West had touched Thập directly, had made him feel something strongly for his dead wife, had only made things worse. He’d had no choice” (24-25, from “Open Arms”).
“I am just a businessman, not a poet. It is the poet who is supposed to see things so clearly and to remember. Perhaps it is only the poets who can die well. Not the rest of us” (41, from “The Trip Back”).
“I found that I myself was no longer comfortable with the old ways. Like the extended family. Like other things, too. The Vietnamese indirectness, for instance. The superstition. I was a good American now, and though I wished I could do more for this old man next to me, at least for my wife’s sake, it was not an unpleasant thought that I had finally left Vietnam behind” (50, from “The Trip Back”).
“We were like that, the children of dust in Saigon. At one look we were Vietnamese and at another look we were American and after that you couldn’t get your eyes to stay still when they turned to us, they kept seeing first one thing and then another” (82, from “Letters from My Father”).
“For a time in my life, the part of me that could believe in this story was dead. I often think, here in my new home, that it is dead still. But now, at least, I do not wish it to be dead and it does not make me feel foolish, so perhaps my belief is still part of me. I love you, my son, and all I wish for you is to save your life. Tell this story that I have told you. Try to think of it as true” (131, from “In the Clearing”).
“There is much power in objects” (162, from “Relic”).
“Ho Chi Minh came to me again last night, his hands covered with confectioners’ sugar” (278, from “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain”).
“…and perhaps what began beneath the bombs of the B-52s is now complete. Perhaps I am no longer a man” (301, from “Salem”).
The 1993 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The three-member fiction jury consisted of one prior prize winner (Anne Tyler) and two other frequent fiction jury members:
- Chair: Anne Tyler (1941-present) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 for her novel Breathing Lessons. She was also a runner-up in 1986 for her novel The Accidental Tourist, and in 1983 for her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Additionally, her novel Earthly Possessions was mentioned in the jury report in 1978. She previously served on the fiction in 1985 when Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie won and in 1991 when Rabbit at Rest by John Updike won. Click here for my brief biography on Anne Tyler.
- Richard Eder (1932-2014) was an American film reviewer and a drama critic who spent nearly three decades working for The New York Times in various jobs, including as foreign correspondent in Latin America, film reviewer, and the drama critic. In later life, he was a book critic for The Los Angeles Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the National Book Critics Circle annual citation for an entry consisting of reviews of John Updike’s Roger’s Version, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, and Robert Stone’s Children of Light. He died in 2014 at the age of 82 of pneumonia as a result of post-polio syndrome (a childhood disease he contracted before the advent of the polio vaccine). He previously served on Pulitzer fiction juries in 1989 and 1991.
- Charles Johnson (1948-present) is a scholar and author of many works, including fiction, philosophy, nonfiction, and even collections of his political cartoons. He was born in Evanston, Illinois, and spent much of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle where he was the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English until his retirement in 2009. He received his BS degree in journalism, an MA in philosophy from Southern Illinois University, and his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University. His early goal with writing was to contribute to and enrich the tradition of “African-American philosophical fiction” and he was mentored by the novelist John Gardner. Johnson’s novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990, making him the first African American winner of the prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953. He has received numerous other accolades throughout his career, including a MacArthur genius grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served on three different Pulitzer fiction juries as well as three National Book Award juries (twice chairing the fiction panel for the latter).
Anne Tyler’s jury report was submitted to Bud Kliment (assistant administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes) in December 1992. In the report, the trio identified three contenders for the fiction prize: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott, and Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates.
Regarding A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, the jury wrote: “We moved into Vietnam and then moved out. With remarkable sensibility, Robert Olen Butler moves Vietnam into us, and it won’t move out. Most of our fiction about the Vietnamese War tells us what Americans felt like being there. Some of these stories tell what it felt like to the Vietnamese to have us there. Others tell of the Vietnamese whom the war displaced to the United States. Butler writes of what still haunts them. In a bewitching translation of voice and sympathy, he shows what it means to lose a country, to remember it, and to have the memory to begin to grow old. He writes as if it were his loss, too.”
After reading the jury’s other two recommendations, it seems the Pulitzer Board made the final selection of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
In more recent years, Robert Olen Butler has told an amusing story about his Pulitzer Prize. Upon the publication of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain he was sent out on his first book tour. At one of the stops in Seattle, a mere six or so people showed up. Despite being slightly dismayed, Butler nevertheless delivered a stellar reading of his book for these people and then signed all the books. But then the novelist Charles Johnson (who would later serve on the Pulitzer fiction jury) heard about Butler’s event, received his own signed copy, and praised the book himself. Butler has often credited this little serendipitous moment with helping him to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Who is Robert Olen Butler?
Robert Olen Butler (1945-present) was born in Granite City, Illinois. His father, Robert Olen Butler Sr., was an actor and theater professor who became chairman of the theater department of Saint Louis University. His mother, Lucille, was an executive secretary. Butler received his BS from Northwestern University and an MA in playwriting from the University of Iowa. One of his writing professors was none other than Anatole Broyard, the famed essayist, editor, and daily book reviewer for The New York Times (Broyard was also a previous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jury, click here for my Pulitzer review of The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer which features a brief biography of Anatole Broyard).
Butler regarded himself as a playwright before serving in the Vietnam War from 1969 to 1971. He first worked as a counter-intelligence special agent for the Army and later as a translator. Perhaps it goes without saying that his experience in Vietnam significantly influenced his writing career. In 1987, Butler received the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a veteran.
After his service, and before embarking on a literary career, Butler worked as a steel mill laborer, a taxi driver, a substitute teacher, and even editor-in-chief of Fairchild Publication’s weekly trade publication “Energy User News.” It was while working for Fairchild that Butler began writing fiction. He has stated that his first four novels were written on legal pads while commuting to work on the Long Island Rail Road. He reportedly wrote a wide variety of pieces during this period, very few of which have ever seen the light of day.
Butler’s first novel was The Alleys of Eden published in 1981. It was about an American deserter who decides to stay in Vietnam (it was reportedly rejected by publishers some twenty times). This was followed by a string of novels, each on a variety of different themes and settings (in total, he has published some sixteen novels to date according to the biography on his website). He has also published a thriller series, six short story collections (of which A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was the first), nonfiction works, and even Hollywood scripts.
Butler taught creative writing from 1985 to 2000 at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with his colleague John Wood, to whom A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is dedicated. He then joined the faculty of Florida State University as a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor, holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing (Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975 for his novel The Killer Angels, click here to read my review of the novel). For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for various Hollywood studios, but as is typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it onto the screen.
In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Butler has also received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and Del Sol Press created an award for short fiction named in his honor (the Robert Olen Butler Prize). In 2009, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the State University of New York system (SUNY).
He has been married six times. First to Carol Supplee, which ended in divorce; then to poet Marylin Geller, which ended in divorce; then to Maureen Donlan, which ended in divorce; then to novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry, who somewhat dramatically left him to be one of Ted Turner’s girlfriends (Butler exposed this love triangle, along with other sordid details about her past childhood sexual abuse and her envy of his Pulitzer Prize among other things, in a widely reported email that was initially sent to a small group of friends and graduate students at Florida State University); then he married Kelly Lee Daniels, a trans non-binary poet who now goes by the name K. Iver, which ended in divorce; and finally to Clara Guzman Herrera, who tragically died in 2024.
Currently, Robert Olen Butler appears to reside in Florida and he has one son from his second marriage to Marylin Geller as well as stepchildren from his sixth marriage to Clara Guzman Herrera.
Film Adaptations
- None
Further Reading
- I’m not sure if I will ever get the chance to return to Robert Olen Butler’s published works, but if any passing reader happens to stumble upon my odd little corner of the internet and has a pressing recommendation for me from Butler’s oeuvre, please feel free to post a comment or send me an email.
Literary Context 1992-1993
- 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1930–2017) “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” He was the first Caribbean writer to win the prize.
- 1992 National Book Award Winner: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
- 1992 Booker Prize Winner: awarded to both The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1992 was Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. Other notable bestsellers that year included The Pelican Brief by John Grisham, Gerald’s Game by Stephen King, The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice, and Mexico by James A. Michener.
- R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series was first published.
- Paul Auster’s Leviathan was published.
- Iain Banks’s The Crow Road was published.
- A. S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia was published.
- Paulo Coelho’s The Valkyries was published.
- Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses was published.
- Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs was published.
- Toni Morrison’s Jazz was published.
- Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was published.
- W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants was published.
- John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration was published.
- Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal was published.
- Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep was published.
- Volume 4 of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series was published.
- John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel Death Is Forever was published.
- Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County was published.
- Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book was published.
- P. D. James’s The Children of Men was published.
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt was published.
- Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Had I been a Pulitzer judge in 1993, the award likely would have been toss-up for me between either Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain or Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses. However, since the latter has enjoyed a stratospheric literary reputation, I was very glad of the opportunity to encounter a deep and penetrating short story collection like A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. This remarkable book has permitted me the chance to learn a great deal about Vietnamese culture, and it has shown me a little corner of American culture that is often overlooked. This beautiful panoply of stories tenderly humanizes Vietnamese people and rejects the impulse to caricature or stereotype them. But more importantly, it explores enduring themes affecting the human condition. While George Packer’s initial 1992 review of the book in The New York Times (“From the Mekong to the Bayous”) was lightly critical of the book for what he saw as touches of sentimentality throughout several stories, I would respectfully disagree and instead praise A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain for all its merits. This is another one of those rarefied gems in the Pulitzer canon. It is perhaps not widely read today, but it should be.
If I was compelled to rank the short story collections I have yet encountered along this Pulitzer Prize journey, I think first would come John Cheever’s collected stories, then Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. This would then be followed by Katharine Ann Porter’s collected stories and James Alan McPherson’s delightful Elbow Room, then James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (assuming this counts as a traditional short story collection), and lastly Jean Stafford’s collected stories. Ask me tomorrow and my opinion may very well change. For the most part, I have thoroughly enjoyed almost all of the short story collections that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But if some passerby happens upon this review and has a differing opinion from my own, I welcome the feedback below.
Butler, Robert Olen. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Grove Press, New York, New York, 2001 (first published in 1992 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc). Dedication: “For John Wood, my friend and colleague.”
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.