BOOK REVIEW : Portrait of One Legacy of Vietnam

The Deuce by Robert Olen Butler (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 303 pages).

The 16-year-old protagonist of Robert Olen Butler’s sixth novel, “The Deuce,” has three names. He is Anthony (Tony) James Hatcher, the son of a Vietnam veteran, who lives with his father, now a district attorney, and his father’s American wife, and later a succession of his girlfriends in Pt. Pleasant, N.J. He also is Vo Dinh Thanh, the son of a drug-addicted Vietnamese bar girl, Nghi, whom he hasn’t seen since he was 6 and his father brought him to America after striking a deal with Nghi. And he is the Deuce, a runaway who spends most of his time in the Port Authority Terminal building in New York just off Times Square.

“The Deuce” is the name the regulars have given 42nd Street, and it’s the name a panhandling Vietnam veteran named Joey Cipriani gives the young protagonist after they meet up in the terminal.

The complex historical and emotional legacy of Vietnam is only beginning to be sorted out, and there is certainly the promise of a fresh angle in a novel focused on a Vietnamese-American teen-ager who owes his very life to the war--a war that split our society in two and, whether or not the war was won, virtually destroyed the country of Vietnam.

Butler has a flair for rendering the dense simultaneities of New York. The main setting of the Port Authority, being circumscribed while at the same time endlessly various, seems well chosen, an opportunity to render the oddly cozy monotony and the wild-card uncertainty of the urban circuit.

And in many passages, Butler does this very nicely.

Butler is at his best in sequences where his protagonist is grounded in a particular setting and drama, but the greater part of this book reduces itself to repeated set-pieces--like the map room at the main branch of the public library or the Lower East Side room in a boarded-up building that Cipriani shares with his friend--where the Deuce does a lot of reflecting, frequently segueing back to his early childhood in his mother’s rooms and in the streets and alleys of Saigon.

One feels a little bullied by the “important,” not to say sacrosanct, themes awash on every page of this novel, and it’s this reviewer’s guess that Butler himself may have felt a little bullied by them, too.

The Deuce, after all, is a parent’s standard teen-age nightmare: a self-important, humorless searcher with a very big chip on his shoulder. Does the fact that he is half-Vietnamese excuse the fact, or oblige us to listen to him endlessly as we would be less likely to do with his non-Vietnamese counterpart? In life, perhaps so. In a novel, not at all. “Remarks are not literature,” Gertrude Stein said long ago to Ernest Hemingway. Nor is thinking storytelling, unless it gets very good indeed.

In the penultimate chapter of “The Deuce,” dramatic action comes to the fore, but it’s as if it’s been infected by the overblown, simplistic propensities of the narrator’s thought processes. It’s pure teen-age revenge fantasy--with a knife-wielding homosexual pimp getting exactly what he deserves, thanks to our hero--and it’s supposed to bring the Deuce’s long-winded identity crisis to a resolution.

Butler is a conscientious craftsman who knows how to bring his backgrounds vividly to life, and there are places where his young protagonist touches the poetry of youth’s perennial lonely search. But the Deuce seems too important to himself--and to Butler--to let enough life in to allow him to get real.