[In the following review, Bonner offers a plot overview of The Deep Green Sea, commending Butler's development of an ensemble cast, but criticizing the book's lack of action.]

Vietnam has entered the U.S. literary and historical imagination with nearly as strong a force as the Civil War. Major American writers like William Faulkner have used the Civil War to probe the transformation of a Southern self into an American one. Most recently, Charles Frazier in his novel Cold Mountain revives the Civil War more for its metaphorical possibilities and less for its own sake.

Although the Vietnam War lies too close in time for any significant romanticizing to have obscured the pain, it has continued to be a journalistic subject of numerous historical studies and the focus of much fiction. Most novels and stories do not center on the realism ordinarily associated with the historical novel; rather they use the war as a lens through which the readers might see the struggles of American soldiers splayed out thousands of miles from their homeland. Tim O’Brien's Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried offer ample evidence of this trait penetrating external realities to the longer lasting interior ones. Vietnam in the American experience provides the venue for much of Robert Olen Butler's fiction and the power that brought him the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his collection of stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, since he maintains that contact with the Vietnamese changed the way America defined itself. Consequently, he saw the need to explore not only those Americans who went to war, but those Vietnamese with whom they were engaged as friends and foes, many of whom now belong to a world-wide diaspora.

In The Deep Green Sea, Butler takes his readers to the postwar “new Vietnam” and into the company of a former American soldier who has made the intimate acquaintance of a beautiful young Vietnamese woman. Benjamin Cole is “in country” as part of a quest “for things to be whole”; Le Thi Tien works as a guide tot the Government tourist agency in Saigon, a name that persists despite its new one, Ho Chi Minh City. An emphasis on names signals that names constitute an essential dimension toward self-knowledge.

The narrative opens dramatically with Ben and Tien in bed together, advances through the alternating perspectives of these two characters and addresses their current experiences and environment as well as their pasts. Butler, who takes advantage of recent interests in the shared margins between mystery fiction (Dashieil Hammett, Chester Himes) and literary fiction (Henry James, William Faulkner), controls closely the flow of knowledge sought by characters and reader—a technique that makes the reader a silent and invisible observer of both the psychological and physical realities of the characters. As Ben's interest in Tien goes beyond physical attraction toward emotional attachment, his need to know who Tien is and whether she has a place in his Vietnamese past rises like a crescendo drowning out his initial purpose for being there. Tien herself falls in love with him and fears that the knowledge he seeks might destroy what they have found in themselves.

Despite her fears, Tien journeys with Ben into the countryside near the sea to discover the fullness of their identities. In this endeavor they revive the myth of Vietnam's origins spelled out near the beginning of the novel: A dragon who ruled the oceans surfaced and flew to the land that would become Vietnam, where he met and fell in love with a fairy princess. After they married, she laid a hundred eggs from which came 50 princes and 50 princesses, but the dragon was not happy and returned to the sea with 50 children. The fairy went to the mountains with the remaining 50, and from them came the people of Vietnam. The lives of Ben and Tien mirror this myth in many ways, especially as male and female they come from the West and the East. Butler, knowing that knowledge not only comes from suffering but also begets suffering, makes the narrative turn on their journey.

If such a situation has the mark of drama, it should be mentioned that Butler was first drawn to the stage. In a Xavier Review interview in 1996, he spoke of how his “most impassioned writing” went into stage directions. In The Deep Green Sea he clearly reverses that inclination and creates a novel with the power of an ensemble, as characters speak and act in the round, though one yearns for more action. This novel, originally and suitably titled “Cleave,” a thematic continuation of Butler's novel They Whisper, explores the role of sexual intimacy in the lives of two people who must discover the world of their hearts and that of the changing stages about them.