Shelburne Falls may seem a rather small location to attract an author who has won numerous national awards, but Robert Olen Butler is coming to Arms Library in the falls on Monday, Sept. 19.
“Fiction is the art form of human yearning,” Robert Olen Butler said with poetry in his voice, on a day he was packing for the tour that will bring him to Shelburne Falls to read from his new novel of veterans and family, “Perfume River.”
Butler, the author of 16 novels and six volumes of short stories, is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature.
“A complete accident” is how Nancy Eisenstein, co-owner of Boswell’s Books, termed Butler’s visit.
“His publicist thought she was booking him into an event at Boswell’s Book Store in Milwaukee, Wis.,” Eisenstein informed me. “It wasn’t until we called her to firm up logistics that she realized she’d made a very big strategical error.
“Fortunately, he was scheduled to be in Boston on Sept. 20 and enjoys driving around New England, so he graciously agreed to add little Shelburne Falls to his tour of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Chicago.”
I asked Butler by telephone last week whether he had experienced any villages the size of Shelburne Falls.
“I live in a town called Capps, Fla., which has a population of two,” he replied. “For about a 4 -year period, the population was one. If you had talked to me then, you would have been speaking to the mayor of Capps. I was happily voted out of office about five years ago.”
The new mayor is his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler, he informed me. “So Shelburne Falls feels like the big city to me.”
We moved on to talk about the Vietnam War, the conflict at the center of his new novel. The main character in “Perfume River” is Robert, a veteran who teaches at Florida State University. He lives in an old house with his wife, Darla, a former antiwar activist who is also a scholar.
Two events in Robert’s life get the book’s plot going. First, while eating lunch at a health food store, he bonds with a homeless man named Bob. Although Bob is too young to have served in Vietnam, his demeanor reminds Robert of the war in which he himself served.
Second, Robert’s elderly father, a veteran of World War II, is rushed to the hospital and may be dying. It was in large part to please “Pops” that Robert decided to go to Vietnam. His father’s looming death brings the past back to infuse the present.
Pops’s illness also brings Robert’s brother Jimmy back into contact with the family. Jimmy fled to Canada decades earlier to avoid the draft and hasn’t spoken or written to his family since.
Vietnam represents many things to the characters in the book — a physical location seared in Robert’s recollection, an idea that divided Americans then and now, a time of intensity for many Americans, an intersection between family and nation.
The end result is a story that of
I asked Robert Olen Butler about the place of Vietnam both in the memory of his characters and in the collective memory of Americans.
He explained that 80 percent of all soldiers who go to war don’t actually see combat, “never experience war in an ongoing way in th
For that 80 percent, as well as for the people at home viewing our first televised war, Vietnam was about much more than fighting in the jungle, according to Butler.
“What it was about, I believe deeply, was a collision of cultures,” he explained. “Vietnam drastically rearranged the sensibilities of virtually every American in terms of who is ‘our own’ and who is ‘the other.’ And that is the great question that is being fought on CNN and Fox News and MSNBC every day now.”
He went on to say that the war illuminated a question we all face, one that “is at the heart of every piece of great literature: ‘Who the hell am I?’….
“(We want to satisfy) our yearning for self, for identity, for a place in the universe,” he elaborated. “That’s what Vietnam did to us, big time, engaged that persistent human yearning.”
Like his protagonist, Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam and teaches at Florida State University. I asked him whether the book was autobiographical.
He thought for a moment.
“On one hand,” he said, “I would invoke Graham Greene, who says all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
“So to some great extent I have been working on this book for 60 of my 71 years at least.
“It is certainly about the deepest self that I have … meaning it really is a book about all that I have come to understand through my own life experiences, obviously, and my empathy with others, what I have come to understand about the human condition.”
He added, however, “For it to be a work of art, it has to be the product of a life forgotten. You cannot reliably take any detail out of this book.
“Is it about me? Profoundly so. Is it about me? Not in the least.”
His response to my question about autobiographical details reflected an ongoing interest of Butler in the ties between theatricality and storytelling. During our conversation, he recalled a tale his mother often told about finding him in his crib talking to himself when he was very small.
“I, at one point, said to her that I was pulling a movie out of the wall,” he recalled. “I have been putting stories together for a long time.”
Butler went to Northwestern University in 1969 to study acting. “I realized that I’d rather write the words than interpret them,” he remembered. “I went on to get a master’s degree in playwriting at the University of Iowa.”
After serving in Vietnam, however, he admitted to himself that he was more a novelist than a playwright. “The way I saw the world and wanted to engage with the world was writing fiction,” he said. “I wrote a lot of bad stuff before I ever started publishing, but that’s part of the deal.”
Butler promised that his thespian side will be on display on Monday when he reads from his book in Shelburne Falls.
“If people have experiences with writers reading from their work that hasn’t been fully entertaining, it’s going to be different,” he promised. “The ham sizzles hotly in me on these occasions.”
Robert Olen Butler will read from “Perfume River” on Monday, Sept. 19, at 7 p.m. at the Arms Library. Boswell’s Books will be on hand to sell copies of the book. A special discount will be offered to veterans.
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” Visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com.