killing of a Viet Cong captive. Fluent in Vietnamese, he has come to feel himself more Vietnamese than American, but barriers continue to exist between him and his adopted country. He awaits the arrival of the North Vietnamese in a room that he has shared with Lanh for five years, since his desertion. As Cliff’s memories move through his past, the scene shifts from images of his time with military intelligence to his failed marriage to his family in Illinois. At the last minute, Cliff decides to flee, and he convinces Lanh to join him. They make it onto one of the last helicopters out of the city.

On a ship heading back to the United States, the deserter passes himself off as a journalist and then runs away before being fingerprinted in California. Reunited with Lanh, he returns to Illinois. There, the two find that Lanh’s struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar world and Cliff’s uncertainties about his past and his future place too much strain on their love for each other, and Cliff ultimately leaves alone for Canada.

Told primarily from Cliff’s perspective, The Alleys of Eden is impressive for its evocation of his collage of memories. The strategy of dividing the novel into a Vietnamese half and an American half is in some respects an effective way of structuring the plot to highlight the troubled love of Cliff and Lanh. However, the second half of the novel is also anticlimactic, after the review of Cliff’s troubled past and the sudden flight through the alleys of Saigon, and the part of the story that takes place in the United States lacks the tension and momentum of the first half.

Wabash

Wabash is one of only a few novels Butler has published that do not deal with the Vietnam War. Wabash is, however, set in a war of sorts. It takes place during the Great Depression, in 1932, in a steel town based on Butler’s hometown. It tells the story of Jeremy and Deborah Cole, a couple mourning the death of their daughter. Jeremy is a steelworker employed in a mill where his friends and coworkers are being laid off every day. Through a man he meets at work, Jeremy becomes involved with communist radicals. At first he is put off by their rhetoric and by their language of ideology. However, he is angered by the brutality of the mine’s management and by the victimization of other men on the job. Eventually, he decides to attempt to kill the politically ambitious owner of the mine.

While Jeremy fights his battles in the masculine world of the steel mill, Deborah struggles with conflicts among the women in her family. Her mother and two of her aunts are close-knit but troubled in their relations with one another and with Deborah. Her grandmother is approaching death; a third aunt has converted to Catholicism and has been rejected by all the other women of the family. Deborah finds the ostracized aunt, Effie, and after the grandmother’s death Deborah manages to convince Effie to attend the funeral. Even the death of their mother will not reconcile the other women with Aunt Effie, however, and Deborah fails in her efforts to bring the family together.

Jeremy and Deborah’s lives and struggles come together when Deborah stops Jeremy’s assassination attempt and the two of them leave Wabash. Though both lose their separate battles, the story reaches a resolution as the two narratives, one of the woman and one of the man, reach a single end.

Wabash is a moving novel that established Butler’s ability to deal with topics other than the Vietnam War. It does echo the central themes of the Vietnam novels, however: the importance and difficulty of love between a woman and a man and the private pains of those caught up in social and political crises. If, at times, the characters seem a bit too cinematic and a bit too unbelievable, this may be a consequence of Butler’s efforts to reach back in time for the legendary past of his present-day Illinois.

The Deep Green Sea

As in so many of Butler’s fictions, two lovers occupy center stage in The Deep Green Sea. Ben Cole, son of Jeremy and Deborah Cole of Wabash, is a Vietnam War veteran. Ben is haunted by his memories of the war and world-weary as a result of his failed marriage. Returning to Vietnam, he meets Tien, a tour guide. Tien is the daughter of a Vietnamese bar girl who sold herself to American soldiers, one of whom was Tien’s father. Tien is also haunted, by both her mother’s desertion and her unknown father.

The novel uses first-person narration, alternating between Ben and Tien, enabling Butler to present their affair through the eyes of each. Butler presents a woman’s point of view with an insight possessed by few other male novelists, and the fact that he speaks convincingly with the voice of a Vietnamese woman is a tribute to his versatility. The beginning of the story takes place in Tien’s room, where the lovers recall scenes from their pasts. These two sets of thoughts and memories provide rather weak structure for the narrative; the novel does not, at first, seem to be leading anywhere. However, soon the question of Tien’s parents emerges and the tragic appeal of the story is made evident.

While serving in the war, Ben had a Vietnamese girlfriend, a bar girl. Because Tien’s mother was a bar girl, the apparently faint possibility that Tien’s mother and Ben’s former girlfriend might be the same person trouble the couple. They leave for the town of Nha Trang, where Tien’s mother is known to live, for proof that the only relationship between the two of them is that of lovers. The truth that they find in Nha Trang is ultimately devastating to them both. The Deep Green Sea may well be the least complex of Butler’s novels in plot and action. However, with its echoes of Oedipal tragedy and its evocation of the many-sided adversities of the Vietnam War, it is a haunting work.

Mr. Spaceman

With Mr. Spaceman, Butler moved into the new territory of science fiction. The novel is also more comic than most of Butler’s work and is in some ways reminiscent of the writing of Kurt Vonnegut. It tells the story of Desi, an alien from another planet making contact with the denizens of Earth. Desi’s race does not use language, and he has learned his English from Earth mass media, mainly television. This enables Butler to make imaginative use of TV clichés and to engage in meditations on the nature of language through Desi’s thoughts.

The alien protagonist has been taking humans from Earth for years in order to learn about them and about their planet. In the process, he has acquired an Earth wife, the former hairstylist Edna Bradshaw of Bovary, Alabama. At the time of the story, Desi has taken on board his ship a bus bound from Texas to a casino in Lake Charles, Louisiana. As Edna prepares for a dinner with the twelve people who were on the bus, Desi examines the lives of the passengers by moving into their thoughts and speaking in their voices, a process that evokes Butler’s own approach to fiction.

One of the bus riders takes the alien for the Christ of the second coming, and the others take varying points of view on Desi’s potential role in saving humanity. The dinner with the twelve recalls Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples as the extraterrestrial discusses his plans for revealing himself at last to humankind, pondering the possible deadly reactions of the citizens of Earth. This is not a tragedy, however, and the novel takes a sudden comic turn away from Desi’s self-sacrifice at the end.

Fair Warning

Presenting the point of view of a member of the opposite sex is one of the most difficult exercises a writer can attempt. In Fair Warning, Butler adopts the persona of Amy Dickerson, a New York auctioneer of antiques and other collectibles, former model and actor, and daughter of a wealthy Texas oil and cattle baron. Just past her fortieth birthday, Amy is still single, a fact that receives the attention of her widowed mother and her younger sister, Missy.

The story revolves around Amy’s romantic relationships with Trevor Martin, a successful attorney and client of her auction house, and Alain Bouchard, a wealthy French businessman who is purchasing the auction house itself. Amy’s life is also complicated by her relationships with Missy, who is in a troubled marriage with a Wall Street stockbroker, and with her mother, who is back in Texas struggling with memories of the deceased family patriarch. With its glamorous but single and aging heroine and her sophisticated suitors, the novel comes dangerously close to stereotypes of popular women’s fiction. At some points it does seem to take on the qualities of soap opera, but Amy’s incisive reflections on collecting as a way of living and the sudden turns in plot manage to steer the story away from both sentimentality and predictability.