THE DEEP GREEN SEA.<i> By Robert Olen Butler</i> .<i> Henry Holt: 226 pp., $23</i>

“The Deep Green Sea” opens with Le Thi Tien, a 26-year-old Vietnamese girl, in bed with Benjamin Cole, a 48-year-old American vet. They are strangers, and they make love: the passionate, earth-moving, life-shattering kind. Tien has told Ben three things: that she is a virgin; that her mother, who was a prostitute, is dead; and that her father, whom she never met and who was an American GI, is also deceased. The first two statements are lies. The last one, which she fervently believes--it is, in fact, the sun around which her emotional life revolves--will also turn out to be untrue. And it will set the stage for what is meant to be the tragic love story of Tien and Ben.

Like the classical genre to which it aspires, “The Deep Green Sea” raises such fundamental moral questions as: What is the price of knowledge and of truth, and what is the difference between them? Do we commit a sin against others when we deceive ourselves? What happens when we try to protect those we love by lying to them? What is the price of memory, and what happens to those who attempt to extinguish it?

Unfortunately, though, another question, both moral and literary, is raised by Butler’s new novel: What happens when a writer begins to cannibalize his own work? Many, if not most, of “The Deep Green Sea’s” themes--memory and forgetting, incest, suicide, prostitution, erotic love, the Vietnam War--were mined in his previous novel, “They Whisper,” a deeply flawed but nonetheless densely, beautifully evocative book. What we are presented with now, though, is Butler Lite.

Tien and Ben meet one day on a street in present-day Ho Chi Minh City and have a brief conversation about dogs; almost immediately, they are irrevocably in love. They know that they are meant for each other. They know that they are now complete. They know that this is It.

What’s wrong with this picture is not exactly that it’s unrealistic; no doubt such things do happen and such feelings are felt every day all over the globe. The problem with Butler’s scenario is not so much that it’s unconvincing as that it’s simply so uninteresting. He has dispensed with characterization, with individuality, with the quirky, funny, unexpected, peculiar, tortuous, complicated ways in which people fall in love--dispensed, that is, with everything that might engage us. As readers at the end of the 20th century, we expect more from a love story than the quickie that Butler offers here. What Lionel Trilling wrote of Alexander Portnoy’s neuroses applies equally well to Butler’s brand of romance: “Whatever considerations of this kind may mean to us within the four walls of our private lives, as the material of art they seem no longer to make their old claim upon the imagination.”

In any case, in this instant paradise a very nasty snake soon appears. It turns out that--surprise!--while on his tour of duty in Vietnam, Ben became involved with a Vietnamese prostitute, and he begins to suspect that Tien may be his daughter. Alas, the reader may begin to harbor similar suspicions way before the lovers, since Tien “smell[s] the smoke of my father’s soul” the very first time Ben kisses her. Nonetheless, she is sure Ben’s fears are baseless.

Both Tien and Ben are in flight from their memories--personal, familial, historical; their love affair is not so much an intricate melding together of two life stories as it is the attempt to simplistically erase any story at all. When Saigon fell (or was liberated, depending on your perspective), Tien was abandoned by her mother on the pretext that prostitutes and their children would be punished. But though the punishments never came to pass, Tien’s mother did not return. Now Tien tries to convince herself that her mother is dead, or that her mother’s abandonment is a form of love; in any case, she insists, “I am no one’s child” (just the sort of claim, the Greeks knew, that it’s probably best to avoid). Only at the end of the book does Tien admit that her mother “saved her own life from a threat that never was, and after that, she wanted nothing from the past, including her daughter.”

But it is Ben who is by far the worst perpetrator of the crime of forgetting. He is ecstatic when Tien tells him she is a virgin because it means “there’s nothing to remember, nothing to ask about, nothing but what’s there for both of you right in that moment, without any history at all, that’s almost too good to be true.” Indeed it is. Even when his suspicions about Tien--which are, of course, intimately tied up with his “sweet guilt” over the Vietnamese prostitute--surface, he still insists that “there’s no past to reckon with, all the women I’ve ever known . . . have faded from me, it’s as if they never existed.” Later, as he and Tien journey to a small village in hopes of finding her mother and eradicating his doubts, Ben assures himself, “[T]here is nothing of war, nothing of death, nothing of the past, there is only this joining of me and this woman . . . and I am at peace.” This is, of course, a series of shoddy lies.

One of the ironies of “The Deep Green Sea”--an irony that the author himself seems wholly unaware of--revolves around the question of truthful language. Tien, who works as a government tour guide, is a child of the revolution (she was 8 when Vietnam was reunited under the Communists), and she speaks the language of revolution, the language of war crimes and imperialism. Ben derisively dismisses such language as “propaganda-talk” and pushes Tien to speak in her own voice. But the unintended joke of this novel is that Ben’s words of love are far more stilted, prefabricated and cliched than Tien’s political rhetoric: “What there is between us . . . I’ve never felt this way before. . . . Not even for my wife,” he says, and, “It feels like the first time for me, too,” and, “You can always tell me the truth.” Compared to this, Tien sounds positively Hegelian, and at least she has a sense of humor: “Go forward for the good of the revolution,” she jokingly tells Ben the first time he penetrates her.

The only truly moving, truly alive relationship in this novel is between Tien and her father’s spirit. “I am a modern girl of a great socialist state but I am not a communist,” Tien introduces herself. “I can still pray for the spirits of the dead . . . for the soul of my father, a soul that I have always understood to be suffering terribly in the next life and in great need of these things I offer him.” Indeed, Tien’s relationship with her father’s ghost is by far her most intimate one, and while her love affair with Ben has a static, overdetermined quality, her relationship with the spirit is churned up as the novel progresses.

We see Tien alternately submit to, beg, bargain with, beseech and rebel against the spirit, whose jealousy, she believes, has created Ben’s doubts: “He has been curling the invisible smoke of his soul around us, making us breathe him in, and he has wisped this way into our brains, filled us with these fears to keep us apart.” She feels the spirit watching her, and she fiercely insists on her freedom to love--and make love to--whomever she chooses: “See what I do. See my nakedness. . . . You must accept this or I will never say another word to the gods for you.” In despair, she tries to banish the spirit: “Go find the woman you loved. . . . Go to her and live on her prayers for a while.” She bitterly remembers her subservience: “I wept for him for years. . . . I prayed for his soul and I burned the incense and offered him food and a place for his soul to rest.” And, in the book’s most chilling line, the desperately vulnerable, desperately fatherless girl succinctly sums up the relationship of daughter to ghost: “I was a bargirl to him.”

Unfortunately, the climactic scene of “The Deep Green Sea” has none of the power and pathos that characterize Tien’s struggle with her father’s spirit. In fact, the confrontation between Tien, Ben and Tien’s mother feels oddly flat--no great surprise, given the one-dimensionality of the characters Butler has created, but a disappointment nonetheless. And the coda evokes--inadvertently, no doubt--nothing so much as that creepy last scene of “Rosemary’s Baby” and calls to mind Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as “seriousness that fails.”

All this is especially disappointing coming from Robert Olen Butler, who, in “They Whisper,” created Ira Holloway and Fiona Price, singular characters who struggled so passionately and affectingly with both the demons and the joys of memory but who knew that the only real question was how--not whether--to embrace the past. (“All of the women who have stirred me in all their special and surprising ways: they are all connected, they are a vast landscape,” Ira says, adding later: “[S]o few of my feelings ever ended, ever really ended, they live even now.”) Conversely, in “The Deep Green Sea,” Butler has taken the easy way out, pimping off the grand themes of literature by creating characters who can do nothing more than schematically represent--as opposed to authentically engage--such themes.

If you’re interested in the ways in which the sins of the fathers (and mothers) stain the lives of their children, you could spend time with Sophocles or the Old Testament or Faulkner or, for that matter, “They Whisper.” But there’s no particular reason to dive into “The Deep Green Sea,” which turns out to be quite shallow.