Set in the New Mexico desert, it is the story of two scientists: one an archeologist unearthing the past, the other working on the development of the first atom bomb.
“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.
An interesting early novel by Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Tabloid Dreams: Stories. Butler won the Pulitzer for A Good Scent, a collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants to America - it was my introduction to his work and I was enchanted by his voice and delicacy in which he handled the subject and people in his book, and it became one of my favorites; Tabloid Dreams, a collection of short stories all inspired by unbelieveable, outrageous and plain weird tabloid headlines was a bold effort which worked - a mixture of the real with the surreal which shouldn't work, but did. I reviewed both here and here.
Countrymen of Bones is Butler's third novel, published in 1983. The title is derived from Wallace Stevens's First Warmth, and the poem's beginning also serves as its epigraph: I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life, As a questioner about reality, A countryman of all the bones of the world?
Set in New Mexico Desert during the second World War, Countrymen of Bones deals with the lives and work of two scientists who both work in the area but are not aware of each other. Darrell Reeves is an archaeologist from the University of Santa Fe, and works laboriously at excavating a mysterious Indian burial site, very out of place in the middle of a desert. 10 miles from Reeves's excavation, physicist Lloyd Coulter works under J. Robert Oppenheimer on developing the first atom bomb. Coulter is works on the proper lens arrangement which will appropriately focus the blast, and effectively create an usable explosive. Lives of both men intersect when the army notices that Darrell's excavation is in their test site - they inform him that he must finish all work and move out within 10 weeks, or else it will be destroyed by the blast. Oppenheimer is sympathetic to Reeves, and sends Anna, a young female member of his staff to help him finish. Predictably, both men develop an interest in Anna and begin pursuing her.
Butler's prose is unemotional and distant, its coldness contrasting with the scorching desert. None of the characters are particularly likable, and none of them seem very deep - Butler's more interested in creating a novel of ideas rather than a genuine study of human relationships. His subject is violence - both Reeves and Coulter study, observe and engage in it. Reeves uncovers the remnants of an ancient king and discovers the violence of his culture and rule; Coulter is preparing a device deadlier than thousands of kings, which would bring on unprecedented destruction and death. Both men seek the reflection of their own natures in Anna, who feels abstract and remote from them both.
The novel has no chapter breaks, and it's best read in one or two sittings - from its quiet beginning it slowlydevelops subdued tension, which systematically escalates until an unexpected and incredibly dramatic conclusion, where Butler makes full use of his skill at creating vivid imagery. It reminded me of Ian McEwan's early novels - the horrific ones - and although it's much less graphic, it's not bad at all.
Some of the history in this book from 1945 is interesting and the story (two stories really) is engaging. However the romances seem quite stilted and some of the drama seems somewhat contrived---but this author is always worth reading.
Excellent. Having finished this book, I'm glad I already own a couple more novels by this author. The style had a stripped-down, straight-forward bluntness to it that I enjoyed, especially in certain extremely dramatic passages.
Countrymen of Bones is heavy on setting - the New Mexico desert during WWII. You've got one man trying to understand himself and the world by looking into the past (the archaeologist) and another concerned wholly with the present and future (the physicist). They butt heads based on this professional difference, but also over a woman whom both are pursuing, though in different ways. It's a pretty subtle book up until the ending, and then things get explosive in a hurry (literally and figuratively). I highly recommend this book - short read but very rewarding.
Butler, Robert Olen. (1983). Countrymen of Bones. New York: Holt.
There are two protagonists in this story set in the New Mexico desert at the end of World War II. Darrell is an archeologist digging up the skeleton of an ancient king. Lloyd works nearby at the Manhattan project, preparing to test the first atomic bomb. They both fall in love with a dark-eyed woman, Anna. Lloyd has the upper hand, you would think, since he is with the bomb people and can order Darrell to clear out of the desert, keeping Anna for himself. It doesn’t quite work out that way.
I was interested in reading something by Butler because I had read his book of advice on how to write fiction, “From Where You Dream.” In that book he said that an author should imagine himself or herself into the interior of each character by going into a dreamlike trance and considering how that character would feel at that moment. By that method, he said, you can create realistic, compelling characters. I wanted to see how it worked in practice.
In this book the narrator (third-person, ranging from omniscient to close), tells the reader what the characters are feeling, sensing, and thinking, just as Butler himself advised. There are a lot of statements like, “He felt angry now…,” “Lloyd wanted…,” “Darrell felt himself tremble and wanted to touch Betty…” Darrell decided it was a king…”
The result is “telling” rather than “showing” the characters' interiors. Butler describes the character’s interior as if it were landscape. Why does he think it’s better to report that Darrell wanted to touch Betty, rather than have Darrell reach out toward Betty’s smooth white shoulder but hesitate then pull his hand back without touching her? By both methods, we know Darrell wanted to touch Betty.
With Butler's method, everything is described through the motivated eyes of some character. All descriptions are the musings of a motivated character who has a point of view and a reason for noticing. For example, instead of “Two soldiers were carrying a large box,” we have, “Lloyd could see that two soldiers were carrying a large box.” It's good advice, in general.
On the other hand, it can be odd when the technique is relentless. Why say that “Darrell felt himself tremble?” How is that different from “Darrell trembled?” Insisting on Darrell’s point of view actually creates distance from the character. A person does not “feel themselves tremble.” They just tremble. So Butler’s technique, when used assiduously, produces clunky results sometimes.
For most characters, such as the coveted woman, Anna, and for Robert Oppenheimer, Butler does not describe feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, only observable behavior, such as Oppenheimer lighting his pipe. It is not the kind of behavior that shows, or reveals, the character’s interiority and results in unknowable puppets. My guess is that Butler’s idea was to keep the spotlight on the romantic competition between the two protagonists, but an undesirable result was to make all other characters flat.
The most moving part of the story, for me, was not the romantic competition for Anna, which I never cared about because the protagonists were both so emotionally repressed. Rather, the exciting idea was the implicit metaphor between Darrell’s excavated skeletal king, who had “mistakenly thought he understand the boundaries of his world,” and Darrell himself, who thought he would just ride out the bomb test then continue digging, having no concept of what an atomic bomb could do.
I have started using Butler’s technique of dream-trancing to imagine myself into the interiors of my characters, but once I have that interior, I show it through action, in the traditional way, rather than have the narrator tell it, as Butler does in this book. I think that works better. Of course, he has a Pulitzer Prize and I don’t.
winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Fascinating story of two (2) scientists, unknown to each other initially, involved in secret work: one digging up the past (archeology), the other developing a nuclear bomb, both interested in the same women (in oh, so strange ways). There were no chapters, so that took some getting used to. I only got this book because it was highly rated via GoodReads + author has a new book out and I was most pleased with this author, which is interesting because I don’t generally find Pulitzer Prize winners ‘my cup of tea’.
The author received kudos writing about Vietnam. In this novel he portrays archaeology clashing with the nuclear age. His story was well developed but its "explosive" ending was rushed and relations seemed expedited. My primary concern was that characters had fairly shallow reactions to the first nuclear test in New Mexico -- I mean, where's the "OMFG!!" It was not as profound as I thought it would be. Yet the story's end did conceptualize the fears & dreams of ancients and what we have in common with those cultures.
One of an interesting pair I read back to back after visiting the region around Santa Fe. The other one is Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon, who also wrote The Good German. Details at http://nortspews.blogspot.com/2008/01...
Bought this book at a used bookstore, it was very cheap and the 'pulitzer price winner' tag caught my eye. To my surprise, the book was signed inside, which was pretty cool as I don't have any other signed books in my shelfs. The book itself is okay. We meet two scientific men that fall in love with the same woman. One is an old, divorced and cantankerous archeologist digging up some bones (hence the name of the novel), and the other is an obsessive and creepy atomic bomb engineer working with Oppenheimer nearby the excavation site. The story begins as if it was the tale of two men fighting for love, but instead we get a woman's fight for love and survival. Towards the end it gets much better, so I think, if you are already beyond the first half and thinking about DNFing the book, maybe try to hustle a little more and it'll be worth it.
The story is set in the New Mexico desert at the end of World War II. Darrell is an archaeologist digging up the skeleton of an ancient king. Lloyd works nearby at the Manhattan project, preparing to test the first atomic bomb. They both fall in love with a dark-eyed woman, Anna. Lloyd has the upper hand, you would think, since he is with the bomb people and can order Darrell to clear out of the desert, keeping Anna for himself. It doesn’t quite work out that way.
I was interested in reading something by Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize ten years after this novel. I read his advice on writing fiction, “From Where You Dream.” He said an author should go into a dreamlike trance and consider how each character feels at that moment, what the character would be perceiving and sensing (all five senses), and what the character would be thinking. By that method, he said, you can create realistic, compelling characters.
In this book the narrator (third-person, ranging from omniscient to close), tells the reader what the characters are feeling, sensing, and thinking, just as Butler himself advised. There are a lot of statements like, “He felt angry now…,” “Lloyd wanted…,” “Darrell felt himself tremble and wanted to touch Betty…” Darrell decided it was a king…”
The result is “telling” rather than “showing” the characters' interiors. Butler describes the character’s interior as if it were landscape. Why does he think it’s better to report that Darrell wanted to touch Betty, rather than show Darrell reaching out toward Betty’s smooth white shoulder but hesitate then pull his hand back without touching her?
Why say that “Darrell felt himself tremble?” How is that different from “Darrell trembled?” Insisting on Darrell’s point of view actually creates distance from the character. A person does not “feel themselves tremble.” They just tremble. So Butler’s technique, when used assiduously, produces clunky results sometimes.
For many characters, Butler does not describe feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, only their observable behavior, such as Oppenheimer lighting his pipe. It is not the kind of behavior that shows, or reveals, the character’s interiority. Consequently, the only two characters in the book who have any interior are Darrell and Lloyd. The others are unknowable puppets.
Nevertheless, I have started using Butler’s technique of dream-trancing to imagine myself into the interiors of my characters, but once I have that interior, I try to show it through action, in the traditional way, rather than have the narrator tell it, as Butler does in this book. I think that works better. Of course, he has a Pulitzer Prize and I don’t.