The latest work by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, is a remarkable and elegant piece of fiction.
PERFUME RIVER
Robert Olen Butler
No Exit Press
By MARGARET BANNISTER
This latest work by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is a remarkable and elegant piece of fiction.
By following the wandering and divagating thoughts and memories of the main characters, he builds a picture of an American family over the years when the US was involved in Vietnam and up to the present. Reference is also made to World War 2.
The main characters are two ageing academics, Robert and his wife Darla, also Robert's younger brother Jimmy and their sick father William, who fought in World War 2, and his wife Peggy. There is also a vagrant ex-soldier from the Vietnam War, Bob, who wanders through the story.
The family is riven by conflicting attitudes to the topic of war, and involvement in it. It is not without heartbreak that the main story emerges of the two brothers and their father.
William has a somewhat "gung ho'' and bullying attitude to war, battle and killing. He is a very strong character and divisive and judgemental in his attitude to his sons' willingness or otherwise to fight in Vietnam.
Jimmy refuses to be drafted (as part of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the '60s), moves to Canada and is cut off by his father. Robert takes a conciliatory action, enlisting as a non-combatant.
We are allowed to see into the minds and memories of these major characters, so that when William, who has heart problems, falls and breaks his pelvis, his inevitable death and funeral bring everything to the surface.
What is so unusual and fascinating in this story is that the method of writing is gentle and non-judgemental, allowing the conflicts to demonstrate themselves, so that the lives of these men and their wives is explored and some healing achieved.
But for Bob, no such healing is possible, and the sheer destructive and deathly nature of war experience is underlined.
Margaret Bannister is a retired Dunedin psychotherapist and science teacher.
