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'The Deep Green Sea' by Robert Olen Butler

Seduced By Reality; Let Down By Mythology

Thursday, January 01, 1998

By Kathleen George

	The Deep Green Sea By Robert Olen Butler Henry Holt $23.00

Robert Olen Butler's new novel, "The Deep Green Sea," is remarkable in many ways, not least for its daring. Butler has been writing about Vietnam for some time, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," mixes a range of styles and approaches.

"The Deep Green Sea" flirts with contradictions. It seems to be realistic but it turns out, it's not. It's a large adult fairy tale. It is also a short book, but not a quick read. The story moves at two speeds at once, much as "Oedipus Rex" does, giving the impression that time is speeding by and is standing almost still. The reader wants to push on to the end and also wants to delay it.

There are two characters in this novel; the others who appear on stairways or in passing cars are a blink of the eye, no more. These two tell their story in alternating episodes. The transitions are so seamless that soon Tien, the beautiful 26-year-old Vietnamese girl, and Benjamin Cole, the Vietnam veteran of 48, are one. They speak with almost the same voice - his peppered with a few American slang expressions, hers with some "second language" usages - and they take up the story from each other as if all there ever was between them was exchange, relationship.

Tien works for Saigontourist. She can be hired to take foreigners around Ho Chi Minh City and its surrounds. Ben has returned to Vietnam after a failed marriage to "complete" himself.

He hangs around the area of the city where he once met Kim, a bar girl, whom he loved. There is an instant and powerful attraction between him and Tien. She breaks the rules of her travel agency and other vaguer, unwritten rules, to invite him to her apartment. Lovemaking is on both their minds, but there are always delays.

Some of the most mesmerizing writing is in the early section of the book in which pages and pages are given to the touch of Ben's hand to Tien's breast. This moment is examined from her point of view, from his, from hers again. In something slower than real time, we are made to experience the attraction, the hesitation, the gentleness. Ben, like other of Butler's men, is a courtly lover, the antithesis of the American locker room Joe, a man who reveres sex and doesn't at all take it for granted.

For Tien, sex is something she has fumbled and stumbled with only briefly in the past.

The love story, told from the two interior voices, seems at first to exist in the realistic world, but we soon come to grant it allegorical qualities. At exactly halfway through the book, the characters have journeyed and arrived at the problem of the novel, the knot at the center, and they must start the journey outward to extricate themselves.

The first half of the book seems effortless. But the second half - with mythic business at hand - might strike some readers as over the top.

The almost Joycean, even Biblical, use of "and" to connect things, comforting in the early pages, announces itself as something more important on the press to a conclusion.

Tien has known the tale of how Vietnam was made since childhood. Every child knows it: A dragon who was lonely came from the ocean to the land where there were jungles, and he met a fairy princess. Th ey married. The princess laid 100 eggs in a silk bag and had a 100 gorgeous children, but the dragon was unhappy and had to go back to the sea. The princess missed him so much that somehow he knew to come back, but then he left again, taking half the children with him.

If anything is disappointing about this startling and beautifully written book, it is that the story resolves mythically when we have been seduced by the characters as real people and are not quite re ady to let them step so easily into the realm of symbolism.

Kathleen George is a free-lance writer and professor of theater at the University of Pittsburgh.