What do you think?
Rate this book
The Alleys of Eden
The extraordinary new novel about Vietnam. Stunning, powerful and eloquent.
246 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
1 person is currently reading
67 people want to read
About the author
Robert Olen Butler
86 books452 followers“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 2, 2017
This book moved me. I remember seeing the striking images of the evacuation of Americans and “at-risk” Vietnamese – footage on TV and photographs in magazines. This author does an excellent close-up of this historical time through the personal perspective of the novel’s characters, and in a way I relived it but it was more real to me in this book.
There are many stories about veterans of that war whose struggles back in America were documented, but this one is different, about a deserter who has lost faith in the meaning of the battle and in the goodness of his country.
The author is adept:
“The war, government, politics … He spit them from his mind like broken teeth.”
“The peak fell away … to the west bay and the ocean beyond. The haze, orange there, spread from a scab of sun… to the horizon where the sun would verge, would fall into the chasm of Asia.”
“His mind vibrated like a muscle clenched tight too long.”
“The large old trees vaulted the street and they held the new night beneath them in spite of a blue stain remaining in the sky, a golden crust remaining on the tops of the apartment buildings.”
“ …they were the things that were imprinted in him – the synapses of culture – the tracks that caught him and pulled him away…”
There are many stories about veterans of that war whose struggles back in America were documented, but this one is different, about a deserter who has lost faith in the meaning of the battle and in the goodness of his country.
The author is adept:
“The war, government, politics … He spit them from his mind like broken teeth.”
“The peak fell away … to the west bay and the ocean beyond. The haze, orange there, spread from a scab of sun… to the horizon where the sun would verge, would fall into the chasm of Asia.”
“His mind vibrated like a muscle clenched tight too long.”
“The large old trees vaulted the street and they held the new night beneath them in spite of a blue stain remaining in the sky, a golden crust remaining on the tops of the apartment buildings.”
“ …they were the things that were imprinted in him – the synapses of culture – the tracks that caught him and pulled him away…”
Read
November 16, 2019It took me over 100 pages before I was really into this story, mostly I think because the tone was somewhat dark and introspective. It is a story full of feeling and realistic for the time and place in the Vietnam war era. Well done.
November 25, 2021
Such a psychological work about characters from different cultures, countries, finding themselves estranged from their origins and finding each other in an undefined space. The final days before and during the fall of Saigon are intense and quite riveting. A bit of a sad story but so well written.
June 23, 2019
It aged.
April 29, 2024
This was less satisfying than other books by this author. I found the tale of a GI deserter from the US Army in Vietnam, towards the end of the war there, somewhat dull.
April 20, 2015
I really enjoyed this novel. Eighty percent of the book takes place in two rooms; a small apartment in Vietnam and a small rented room in America. Clifford Wilkes is a deserter from the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war. He worked in intelligence and is fluent in Vietnamese. He decides to desert after an interrogation session goes wrong and a man dies. After running away from the Army he spends the next four years living with a local girl that happened to be a Vietnamese prostitute. He falls in love with and lives with this girl for four years hiding out in her small apartment in Saigon. The war is ending and all U.S. Personal is leaving Saigon as the Vietcong are beginning to enter and take the city.
This is really where the novel starts, with Clifford ruminating on his life and the choices that he has made up to this point. He loves Saigon and he loves this women, but he knows to stay will mean his certain death along with the women he loves. If he heads to the U.S. Embassy and try's to get on one of the choppers ferrying people out of the country, he is sure to be arrested and imprisoned as soon as he gets back. In his eyes his life with this girl in there single room is perfect. Can he take her with him if he goes? Will she come? Can they someday find the simple life in America that they have now? Will leaving Vietnam change the way either one of them feels about the other.
This is a story of need and how experiences and perception can guide the decisions that we make. That no matter how sure we are of something or how important we think something is, at the end of the day we all seek out what is familiar.
This is really where the novel starts, with Clifford ruminating on his life and the choices that he has made up to this point. He loves Saigon and he loves this women, but he knows to stay will mean his certain death along with the women he loves. If he heads to the U.S. Embassy and try's to get on one of the choppers ferrying people out of the country, he is sure to be arrested and imprisoned as soon as he gets back. In his eyes his life with this girl in there single room is perfect. Can he take her with him if he goes? Will she come? Can they someday find the simple life in America that they have now? Will leaving Vietnam change the way either one of them feels about the other.
This is a story of need and how experiences and perception can guide the decisions that we make. That no matter how sure we are of something or how important we think something is, at the end of the day we all seek out what is familiar.
May 30, 2023
This was great. At the fall of Saigon the last American deserter must get out with his Vietnamese girlfriend. After he deserted, he stayed with her, a prostitute, for five years in her one room in the massive city. He never leaves for fear of getting caught. They get out on one of the last helicopters. In the states their relationship slowly dissolves. The conditions the girl faces alone in the states are not much different than the life she left in Saigon. Only 250 pages but it packs both an emotional and a cerebral punch. Straight forward and heartbreaking.
March 14, 2011
I think I was disappointed because I didn't love this novel the way I was knocked out by Olen Butler's short story collection, but it was still a good read. Very intense ride inside the head of an ex-intelligence officer in Vietnam who deserts and then has to decide what he and his Vietnamese girlfriend will do as Saigon is falling. A bit tiring to read due to a lack of chapters (it's split only into two parts), but I guess stylistically it makes sense, since it makes for a tumbling pace.
March 4, 2010
Vietnam deserter gets out and returns to US
Want to read
September 12, 2013I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12178795
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12178795
August 17, 2016
Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews