Sunday, September 21, 2008

There are authors who spend whole careers mining a single theme. And then there are those who live in the moment, relying on serendipity to be their Muse. Robert Olen Butler is one of the latter. When his sixth novel, The Deuce, got respectful reviews yet sold only 1,068 copies, he did a most inadvisable thing: He published a quirky collection of short stories set in Vietnam called A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. It won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.

He was born in Granite City, a steel town in the St. Louis area. His father was the chairman of the theater department at Saint Louis University; his mother, an executive secretary. As a drama student at Northwestern University, Butler focused on acting, starring in "Bye Bye Birdie" and "My Fair Lady." Summers, he worked in the steel mill, shoveling coal.

With time, he became more interested in creating plays than appearing in them, but the work, he felt, was of a piece. "Like an actor," he says, "a writer has to put himself at his character's center of consciousness. He has to make internal sense of the story." In 1969, just after he completed an M.A. in playwriting at the University of Iowa, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam.

He served in Southeast Asia until 1971, first as a counter-intelligence agent and then as a translator. Fluent in Vietnamese, he would wander away from his lodgings in Saigon to "the steamy back alleys of the city, where I squatted in doorways and talked to the people. Eventually, they invited me into their homes and their lives." When he returned to the United States, he drove a taxi, worked as a high school substitute teacher and finally was hired as an editor for trade publications.

Now the Francis Eppes Professor at Florida State University, Butler has 15 books to his name. His most recent, Intercourse, is a provocative collection of 50 short monologues that depict what famous people are thinking during sex. The hero of his next novel, Hell, forthcoming next year, is an anchorman for the evening news in purgatory, where every street is named Peach Tree.

Butler made gossip columns last year when he sent an e-mail to his colleagues at FSU, alerting them to the fact that his fourth wife, the novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, had left him for media mogul Ted Turner. The long, meandering explication of his marital woes tore through cyberspace like wildfire, making him a character in a drama eerily similar to those in his books.

Which is to say: His work only seems serendipitous; there is a strong internal sense to his story. At the heart of his fiction is human yearning, the hunger for identity, a longing for a place in the universe -- a wanderer's mirage.

-- Marie Arana