Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Robert Olen - Madison Smartt Bell (review date 23 February 1992)

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Madison Smartt Bell (review date 23 February 1992)

SOURCE: Bell, Madison Smartt. “At a Cultural Crossroads.” Chicago Tribune Books (23 February 1992): 3.

[In the following review, Bell praises Butler's ability to assimilate the voices of Vietnamese people who have immigrated to America in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.]

With A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler reveals his discovery of a pocket of cross-cultural peculiarity, which has become, for him, a sort of writer's paradise. The place is Lake Charles, Louisiana, but the people are all Vietnamese, immigrants who came there in the aftermath of the war, Northerners and Southerners, Buddhists and Catholics, drawn by a climate similar to that of their lost nation. The community they form in the new world gives the 15 stories of Butler's collection a sort of novelistic unity, enhanced by his sharp insight into their ways, their beliefs and their...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Madison Smartt Bell (review date 23 February 1992)
   2. Richard Eder (review date 29 March 1992)
   3. Kathleen Gilgore (review date 4 September 1992)
   4. Cynthia McCown (review date 11 December 1993)
   5. Josephine Hart (review date 16 January 1994)
   6. Robert Olen Butler and Missouri Review (interview date February 1994)
   7. Julia Glass (review date 6 February 1994)
   8. Robert Olen Butler and Michael Sartisky (interview date spring 1994)
   9. Mark Ford (review date 12 May 1994)
   10. Helen Heritage August (review date August 1994)
   11. Lorrie Smith (essay date spring 1995)
   12. Jonathan Penner (review date 10 November 1996)
   13. Barbara C. Ewell (review date 17 May 1997)
   14. Susan Balée (review date summer 1997)
   15. Peter Stanford (review date 17 August 1997)
   16. Susie Linfield (review date 25 January 1998)
   17. Thomas Bonner (review date 20 June 1998)
   18. Ron Charles (review date 6 January 2000)
   19. Kit Reed (review date 16 January 2000)
   20. Jonathan Levi (review date 23 January 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

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