By Morgan Jarema
The Grand Rapids Press

The Deep Green Sea
by Robert Olen Butler
Henry Holt and Company
1997
226 pages
$23.00

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler sinks noiselessly to the bottom with his ninth novel, "The Deep Green Sea."

A Vietnam veteran returns to Saigon 28 years after the war, "because of a desire for things to be whole." He meets a woman, a young woman, and within a few days the steel worker turned soldier turned soul-searcher and the tour guide are sharing a bed and "I love you's."

Ben laments his soldier's refuge found in the arms of a teenage Vietnamese "bar-girl" and, although he seeks "the alternative to the truck stop view of sex," returns to the very same scenario. Of course, with Tien it is justified, because "I know from the clutch of her and the smell of her that I am complete."

But something is not right about all that completeness. There are too many coincidences, too many unexplained similarities between the lovers. Barely having cracked the book's spine, the reader knows. Knows Le Thi Tien is Ben Cole's daughter, the result of his wartime tryst.

Butler's Tien is a waif-like Vietnamese caricature of the submissive, exotic "girl for hire": "I want him to touch my secret place again, even though I still feel very tender there." Even though she was raised by her grandmother after her mother's shame-filled departure at having borne a half-American child, Tien seems remarkably sheltered for a 27-year-old woman in 1994.

Sadly -- because the reader must suffer through their nonsense -- it takes the lovers the entire book to realize that their bond is genetic. When they finally can ignore the truth no more after seeking out Tien's mother in a neighboring village, Ben, who'd talked about being whole after finding Tien, predictably "leaps and he flies he flies and is gone."

His child, of course, bears his grandchild, sniveling a devoted homage to him on the book's final page: "(The newborn) will atone for us, my darling. She will love you always, with the pure love of a child who owes her life to her father."

"The Deep Green Sea" is called a "classical tragedy" that "achieves a classic reconciliation of once-warring cultures," but it is a story off tabloid television, generously doused with banal cliche's -- "she's burning in me like incense" -- and baby-soft, jasmine-scented "thighs clutching his naked sides" that makes it more appropriate as a short story in the back of some woman's magazine than agonizingly dragged out to over 200 pages.

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