‘Perfume River,’ by Robert Olen Butler

The protagonist, a man in his late 60s named Robert, is a tenured professor at a university in Florida; he drives an old Mercedes and spends hours in his comfortable home office while his wife, Darla, also a tenured professor, does her own research and goes running.

Characters in this book drink a lot of tea and coffee and use landline phones and answering machines.

Most of the characters’ present-day actions — studying a monument, driving down a road — are ways for them to slip into memory.

For the past is home to all the unresolved issues, including Robert’s experience in the Vietnam War, his affair with a woman he met there, and his troubled relationship with his father and brother that the characters have spent decades trying not to face.

A secondary story line involves a homeless man, who is also named Robert but who goes by Bob, whose increasing instability and interactions with Robert bring further trouble to the novel.

The same is true of the novel’s depiction of the Vietnam War era, which has already been well worn not just in Butler’s previous work but in so many books and movies about that time period.

The novel has the expected mentions of Viet Cong snipers and “exotic” girls; the Vietnamese women are sex objects who disappear.

He focused on the otherness of Vietnamese women, on the seemingly universal kinesthetics of them — the feeling in his chest and arms and loins for their smallness, for their softness of parts and hardness of will, for the glide of them.

[...] all of those qualities faded from him once he returned to the States and to the women who had shaped his desire from boyhood.

[...] in a coffee shop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he felt his physical desire embed itself in a long-shared culture, in a shared cast of mind, in another woman’s uniqueness, an American woman.

In spite of the exoticized cover and title, “Perfume River” is not really a novel about the Vietnam War; it is a novel about a man figuring out his relationship with his father, his own secrets and his own sense of mortality.