The Deuce

By Robert Olen Butler

Book Overview

In The Deuce, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler's searing sixth novel, the intertwined legacies of Vietnam and America are explored in the startlingly fresh voice of a young Amerasian boy, Tony Hatcher. At age six, Tony is snatched away from Saigon and his bar-girl mother and brought to the United States by his American father, a former Army officer, not a district attorney. For ten years, Tony grows up as ill at ease amid the affluence of the new jersey shore as he had been as one of the despised mixed-blood 'children of dust' in Saigon. And in America he has not escaped the stress and the stigma of embodying two seemingly irreconcilable cultures; that conflict rages within him, particularly as he becomes a teenager.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067167093X
• ISBN13: 9780671670931
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An Engaging, Readable Story

THE DEUCE, originally published in September 1989, was the sixth of ten novels written by Robert Olen Butler. This review is for the Henry Holt and Company paperback edition, 303 pages, reissued in January 1994 after Mr. Butler received the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of stories, A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN. In late August 1974, on Wandering Souls Day, a Vietnam War vet named Kenneth returns to Saigon, bargains with a prostitute and claims his then six-year old son, Thanh, an urchin. Kenneth renames his son Anthony James Hatcher and takes him to Point Pleasant, New Jersey where Tony has his own room with a soft bed, TV and computer. The wondrous rescue from the rancid and dusty alleys of Saigon doesn't go well; Tony cannot assimilate the affluent American culture or bond with his father. He struggles for an identity. He wants to be Vietnamese, but his eyelids expose his half-breed origin and he feels caught between two cultures, unable to blend into either. And although Tony hears the echoes of his mother's moans with a rotation of GI's, and recalls her mannerisms that he now recognizes as drug addiction, fond memories of mom haunt him. So at the age of sixteen, Tony runs away to become a street urchin again, this time in New York City. In the first 67 pages, Butler weaves Tony's recollections of Vietnam and the early years with Kenneth into the psychological turmoil of the boy's mid-teens. The remainder of the story centers on Tony's struggle to survive in the environs of sleazy forty-second street and the Port Authority Terminal. Butler's vivid descriptions of that pathetic environment in the summer of 1984 started to depress me and I began to despair waiting for the climax, which I suspect is precisely what the author wants us to feel before he finesses the five-star ending. Within the first three pages of this literary, first-person narrative, I recognized the author's writing voice from THEY WHISPER. But unlike that novel, Butler arranged THE DEUCE into chapters and used conventional paragraphing. THE DEUCE is an engaging, readable story.

Brilliant take on the Vietnamese-American experience

Walt Whitman once said: "It is the job of the poet to resolve all tongues unto his own." In this regard, Robert Olen Butler is a true poet in the way he goes inside the head of a teenage Vietnamese American boy to create a living, breathing character that anyone with a heart should be able to identify with. This book should be taught in American high schools. (P.S. For a fascinating non-fiction companion to this book, read "Born to Kill" by T.J. English, the true story of a Vietnamese-American gang.)

Excellent book...lots of perspective on USA and Vietnam

Butler has written a great piece on an Amerasian's experience in New York City during the 80's. The author shows the main character's struggle with figuring out his identity and the different types of people who live on the fringes in New York City. A great fusion of 1970s Saigon and 1980s New York.