[In the following review, McCown notes the whimsical and romantic nature of the stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and asserts that the collection “celebrates courage and dignity.”]

Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story saga of the American Vietnam experience is not set in Vietnam nor is it about war. Instead, this sometimes whimsical, often moving collection presents the first-person narratives of those who came away—Vietnamese from North and South now living in the United States—and offers tales of heroism not in corporeal battle but in the spiritual struggle for faith and hope in the face of betrayal and impossibility.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Butler's seventh work of fiction in a writing career that began with an acclaimed Vietnam novel, The Alleys of Eden, and which has explored other of America's political and cultural failures, such as the Depression era in Wabash. Butler's fascination with Vietnam began with his military service as a linguist in the early 1970's. His familiarity with the Vietnamese language gives this work its narrative conviction as Butler takes on the personas of expatriate Vietnamese from an aging bargirl to an AmerAsian teen to a 100-year-old man who dreams of his friend Hô Chí Minh.

These storytellers are linked to one another only in the most peripheral way. A common ethnicity and the circumstance of common residence in an immigrant community on the outskirts of New Orleans are the binding agents of Butler's book; his characters remain isolated, each giving his or her intimate account as if to the reader alone. Yet all are eerily connected in spirit by their respective visitations: ghostly artifacts and fleeting forms, which, like Proust's experience of the madeleine, evoke a totality of memory governed by a profound sense of loss. When powerful recollections and deep emotions are thus conjured, narrative authenticity can never come into question, and Butler, a consummate stylist, creates 15 complex and singular Vietnamese-American voices, devoid of affectation and marked by the personal particular.

Miss Noi is the compassionate bargirl whose hopes for marriage disintegrate when her American lover leaves her. Returning to her former profession in a New Orleans night spot, she recalls the apples, rare delicacies in South Vietnam, brought to her from the American military mess by the G.I.'s with whom she sleeps:

I hold an apple and it fills my hand and it is very smooth and very hard and it is red like my favorite aó dài. So red. … In New Orleans I buy many apples. I eat them whenever I want to. But is that memory not better?

When a former G.I. brings Miss Noi an apple and awkwardly proposes, Miss Noi's story becomes its title, “Fairy Tale.”

In “Letters from My Father,” a young girl who has finally been brought out of Vietnam by a devoted but emotionally distant father, ponders the “flat words” of the letters written to her over the years and her father's stiff greeting at the airport “like I was soaking wet and he had on his Sunday clothes, though he was just wearing some silly T-shirt.” She gains insight and courage from her discovery of a packet of letters written to the Government during the years of red-tape delay:

In one … my father says … “This is my wife and my daughter. My daughter is so beautiful you can put her face on your dimes and quarters and no one could ever make change again in your goddam country without stopping and saying, Oh my God, what a beautiful face.”

Sitting in a utility shed on a suffocating Louisiana afternoon, she knows that when her father comes from mowing the lawn she will ask him “to talk to me like in these letters, like when he was so angry with some stranger that he knew what to say.”

Dao, the ancient pater familias who, in the title story, is receiving relatives and friends for a final, formal leave-taking in the custom of his homeland, is visited in dreams by Hô Chí Minh, appearing as in their youth, when Dao was a dishwasher and Hô a pastry cook under the great chef Escoffier. Hô's sugar-scented hands open the casement of memory for Dao: the Carlton Hotel in London, 1917, Hô as a retoucher of photographs in Paris, and as a political leader, still “painting the blush into the faces of Westerners”; the wife now dead who, when “we were already old, we had already buried children and grandchildren,” lifted her silken gown on a sweet, hot night.

A recurring motif in many of Butler's stories is the formation of myth and the function of belief. The mother speaking to her unborn child of wizards and rainbows; the father retelling the story of the gentle dragon and the fairy princess who are the parents of all Vietnamese; the successful businessman whose prized acquisition is John Lennon's shoe, making the sign of the cross as he slips his foot into the relic of the martyr; the housewife who inherits her grandfather's parrot and possibly the care of his soul—all are possessed of a belief system that allows for spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of devastating loss.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is calculated to be positive, even uplifting. It is a Vietnam story unlike any that has been popularized by the dark perception of our own collective American loss. As such, it may reflect too much of the romantic for some tastes. This work celebrates courage and dignity, but not in the face of ultimate defeat. Rather it expresses the essence of old Dao's main religious tenet: “The maintenance of our spirits is simple, and the mystery of joy is simple too.”