HIS LOVER, HIS COUNTRY, AND HIMSELF

Author: By Gabriel Brownstein

Date: SUNDAY, December 28, 1997

Page: L3

Section: Books

Readers familiar with those stories will find Butler's new short novel, ``The Deep Green Sea,'' something of a surprise. Here the writer returns to Vietnam itself, and to the American war veteran; he's in a brooding, melancholy mood. In place of the light, deft touch of ``A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,'' there's a searching, heavy hand. ``The Deep Green Sea'' is only 226 pages long -- you can stick it in the pocket of your winter coat -- but it carries with it a weighty load. It's a love story, yes, but more than that, a relentless investigation of the emotional ravages of war. The plot struggles to bear the full weight of history; the characters struggle to carry the burdens of their respective nations.

Ben is an ex-GI returning to Ho Chi Minh City 29 years after his last tour of duty in what was then called Saigon. Tien is a local tourist guide, the abandoned daughter of a Saigon bar girl and an American soldier. The novel unfolds in flashes from alternating points of view -- hers, then his, then back again -- as the two fall first in love and then into despair. These are two lost souls who in their first night together miraculously find wholeness in each other. Says Ben, ``Before I met Tien, my own desire was a ragged thing, a scrap of retread by the highway kicked up now and then by the force of a passing truck.'' Says Tien, ``It was not clear to me how alone this [life] was until Ben came to me. I did not feel how painful all the nights without him have been until he was here.'' But the miracle of their sudden passion is doomed; the reader begins to pick up on hints of accidental incest long before the characters do. The evidence mounts slowly -- Butler does a brilliant job of dropping a hint in one character's narrative, then in the other's -- and it turns out that Tien may be a daughter that Ben never knew he had.

Were this only a twist in a melodrama, it would be brutal enough, but in this novel, the characters' tortured entanglement serves as a metaphor for the entanglement of their nations. Ben is an iconic American male: a truck driver, a steel worker, a supremely lonely and isolated guy. ``I was scared . . . about half the time in Nam,'' he says. ``I was also happy to be away from Wabash, I think, which was my home, a little Illinois steel mill town in the bottomland of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis.'' He's from the absolute heart of our country -- neither east nor west, north nor south -- he's done the things American men are supposed to do and he's ended up ruined. ``Though I think I can be sure that I have every part of my body,'' he says, ``I know I'm not complete.'' Tien seems similarly to represent her nation and its travails. ``I am a girl of this new Vietnam,'' she says, and 20 pages later, ``I am a modern girl of this great socialist state.'' Early on in the novel, she recounts a myth about the origin of Vietnam in which a sea dragon is said to have made love to a princess, giving birth to 100 children. Quickly, it becomes clear that, metaphorically, at least, Ben is that dragon incarnate, the father of the very country he once ravaged. It's a burden that will necessarily crush him.

The novel's emotional pitch is only amplified by the way Butler has chosen to tell his story. The bold first hundred pages recount one long love scene. The characters kiss and touch and reflect on their own lives and on their first meeting. This sequence is both powerful and metaphorically apt. Butler captures the isolation and intimacy of lovemaking, and he creates a nice symmetry: The two lovers search through their own histories and their countries' intertwined histories as they explore their intertwining bodies. After the long love scene, they hit the road. Confused, worried, suspicious, and hopeful, they drive up Vietnam's Highway One (the same highway Ben drove when he was a soldier), in search of the woman who abandoned Tien when she was a small child, the woman who may or may not have been Ben's lover. Here, the switching of voices slows the plot somewhat, but keeps the focus where Butler wants it: on the characters' introspections, and on their desperate search for wholeness and relief.

``The Deep Green Sea'' works like a tool built for a single purpose; think of the novel as a can-opener: It cuts into its characters as if their secrets were encased in steel. This a ferocious book by a serious writer, an attempt to provide a close inspection of the psychological wounds and historical wreckage left in the aftermath of war.

But going through this close, intense, fierce inspection can be wearying. I read ``The Deep Green Sea'' with admiration for the author's style and integrity but without real emotional engagement in the story. Ben and Tien don't have much life outside of their war-related love and crisis; the novel doesn't vary much in its grimly passionate tone. The book is fixed deep in its own preoccupations. It's an intelligent, serious work, but those who come to it without a predisposition toward its subject matter may find it slow and lugubrious, even morbid.