Perfume River - by Robert Olen Butler (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From one of America's most important writers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, comes Perfume River, an exquisite novel that examines family ties and the legacy of the Vietnam war through the portrait of a single North Florida family.

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam War protests, now bears the fractures of time, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee, solitary jogging, and separate offices. The cracks in Robert and Darla's relationship remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. As Robert and Jimmy's father, who is a veteran of World War II, draws near to the end of his life, aftershocks of war ripple across the family once again, with Jimmy refusing to appear at his father's bedside. And an unstable homeless man, whom Robert meets at a restaurant and at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran, turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on all of the people closest to him.

A profound and poignant novel that continues Butler's exploration of America, war, and the family, as begun in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and A Small Hotel, Perfume River is a powerful and moving portrait of the challenges of close relationships, the resonance of personal choice, and the American experience.

Review Quotes

Praise for Perfume River:

Finalist for the 2017 Southern Book Prize
Longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
One of the Millions' Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"Butler's Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity . . . Butler's particulars on the two brothers' marriages are comprehensively adroit . . . Butler's prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don't extend just to his characters' traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he's addressing . . . 'You share a war in one way, ' Robert thinks. 'You pass it on in another.' Perfume River captures both the agony and subtlety of how that happens."--New York Times Book Review

"This novel confronts the long aftermath of the Vietnam War . . . Butler roves gracefully . . . across the perspectives of many characters, showing particular tenderness in his depiction of Robert's wife, Darla, and her attempt to harmonize conflicting parts of her husband's life."--New Yorker (Briefly Noted)

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain revisits the Vietnam War in this contemporary novel about a family still wrestling with the conflict . . . Butler shifts POV seamlessly among his believably complicated characters."--Newsday

"No synopsis can convey the deceptive richness of Butler's storytelling. The writing style, precise and beautiful, discloses more than the simple surface action of any one passage . . . Butler moves seamlessly between points of view, sometimes within the same paragraph . . . [A] deftly slip-sliding narrative . . . Butler greatly enlarges our sense of what the Vietnam War cost to a generation . . . [A] quietly bristling book . . . Perfume River tells a human story that sums up in an entire era of American life."--Miami Herald

"The story builds its force with great care . . . Its power is that we want to keep reading. The entire journey is masterfully rendered, Butler lighting a path back into the cave, completely unafraid."--Benjamin Busch, Washington Post

"The strength of this novel is its shifting point of view. Butler moves easily among his characters to create a composite portrait of a family that has been wrecked by choices made during the Vietnam War."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A moving story of Vietnam's aftershocks . . . Poignant . . . [An] insightful portrait of a family shaped and shaken by war . . . Perfume River focuses on fathers and sons, but it also gives us a moving portrait of long marriages . . . Butler describes in wry, elegant detail . . . all the little battles and victories on the home front."--Tampa Bay Times

"In Perfume River, Butler continues in his sensitive, highly nuanced, roaming style to explore the repercussions the [Vietnam] war has had on its American veterans, their families and their relationships . . . Eloquent . . . Once again, Butler has written a meaningful novel for the Vietnam War generation. And for their children and grandchildren."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"As smart and eloquent as anything [Butler has] done before . . . This novel is rich in characterization, elegantly written and smart . . . Perfume River holds the reader tight as the action moves to its conclusion."--Alabama Public Radio

"[A] thought-provoking new novel."--Susan Larson, WWNO, "The Reading Life"

"[An] extraordinary novel . . . Butler's elegant return to literary fiction proves his skill and grace once again."--Daily Breeze (Fall's Must-Read Books)

"This latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Butler astutely reveals the Vietnam War's continuing impact on America through two families . . . By the end of this pristinely written novel, we come to see what war does to everyone. A complex story told with poignancy and an economy of means; highly recommended."--Library Journal (starred review)

"Robert Olen Butler . . . has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments . . . Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty. There are marvelous descriptions throughout . . . A provocative novel."--BookPage

"An exceptional novel."--Advance Reading Copy

"The prolific author best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, returns to mine the fraught relationships of military fathers and sons in this searching portrait."--Atlanta Journal Constitution (13 Fall Books That Will Change the Way You See the South)

"Butler's most famous work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, explored the Vietnam War and its aftermath from the perspective of the Vietnamese. With Perfume River, Butler argues that the war continues to exact a psychic toll on American soldiers and destroyed families, as well . . . Butler's prose moves seamlessly between 2015 and flashbacks, narrating personal histories in the present tense."--Chapter 16

"An elegant work of fiction . . . Butler has amazed me with his uncanny ability to bore deeply inside his characters' hearts and minds and illuminate their deepest thoughts and emotions . . . Butler consistently offers up believable and insightful evocations of his characters' innermost feelings. He is also adept at two of the novelist's most difficult tasks: exposition and building a narrative to an unexpected ending . . . Butler handles this seamlessly . . . The ending is a surprise that's only one of the many satisfying elements in this terrific novel."--VVA Veteran

"A deeply meditative reflection on aging and love, as seen through the prism of one family quietly torn asunder by the lingering effects of the Vietnam War. Butler, returning to contemporary literary fiction after three outstanding historical thrillers, shows again that he is a master of tone, mood, and character, whatever genre he chooses to explore. This is thoughtful, introspective fiction of the highest caliber, but it carries a definite edge, thanks to an insistent backbeat that generates suspense with the subtlest of brushstrokes."--Booklist (starred review)

"Butler's assured, elegant novel explores a family fractured by the Vietnam War as its members face the losses of age . . . Eddying fluidly through its half-century span, the book speaks eloquently of the way the past bleeds into the present, history reverberates through individual lives, and mortality challenges our perceptions of ourselves and others."--Publishers Weekly

"The climactic scene . . . is devastating and beautifully written. Many weighty themes . . . the shadow of Vietnam, the push and pull of father-son relationships, the pitfalls of long-term marriages, and the psychic toll of aging . . . Butler pulls it all together into a story that's both complex and meaningful."--Kirkus Reviews

"What I so like about Perfume River is its plainly-put elegance. Enough time has passed since Viet Nam that its grave human lessons and heartbreaks can be--with a measure of genius--almost simply stated. Butler's novel is a model for this heartbreaking simplicity and grace."--Richard Ford

About the Author

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels, including A Small Hotel, Hell, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2015 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.