[The first Pulitzer Prizes
were given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917.
So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five
Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the
most recent winner!]
On how last year’s
winner complements but also complicates a prior winner.
Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer-winning
short story cycle A
Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) was far from the first American
literary text about the Vietnam War, of course; Tim
O’Brien’s magisterial The Things They
Carried (1990) had come out
two years earlier, to cite just one example. Nor was Butler’s the first book to
present a Vietnamese American perspective on the conflict; memoirs like Le
Ly Haslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed
Places (1989) had already tread that path. But Butler’s book might well
have been the first American work of fiction to focus on portraying such
Vietnamese and Vietnamese American perspectives on the war and its aftermaths.
And in any case the book, based in part on Butler’s experiences as a counter-intelligence
officer and translator in the war (during which, he
would later note, the Vietnamese people “just invited me into their homes
and into their culture and into their lives”), comprises an impressive and
important attempt to create a community of Vietnamese American voices and tell
their stories of war and loss, exile and flight, resettlement and home, multi-generational
family and love, and more. A Good Scent
is a ground-breaking and significant book, and certainly deserving of its
Pulitzer.
Last year’s Pulitzer-winning
novel, Viet
Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), wasn’t the first book by an
Asian American author to win the Pulitzer for fiction; that would be Jhumpa
Lahiri’s stunning debut short story collection Interpreter
of Maladies (1999). And of course Nguyen’s was far from the first
Vietnamese American novel about the war—prior examples would include Lan
Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997) and Lê Thi
Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All
Looking For (2003), to name
just two. But in his creation of a multi-layered, mixed-race, anonymous narrator
who has been, often at one and the same time, a North Vietnamese spy and mole,
a South Vietnamese officer, a CIA agent, a Vietnamese American immigrant, and a
consultant on a Hollywood film about the Vietnam War—and who writes and
rewrites, narrates and revises, remembers and alters the novel’s stories as
part of a conflicted confession to Communist captors about those experiences—Nguyen
brings something entirely distinct and new to that tradition. The Sympathizer doesn’t quite reach the same
level of meta-fictional complexity and boundary-blurring as The Things They Carried, but it’s in the
conversation; and while O’Brien’s meta-narrator fades in and out of the text
(due in large part to some of the book’s stories having been initially published
separately), Nguyen’s is at the core of every page and moment, lending his
novel a potent and vital unity.
As any reader of
this blog already knows, I’m all about additive rather than competitive ways of
reading and remembering, and I believe that Butler’s and Nguyen’s books do
indeed work well in tandem, presenting distinct but complementary narratives of
the Vietnam war, Vietnamese American immigrant and community, and many other
related questions. But at the same time, the nuances and ambiguities of Nguyen’s
narrator, and especially his national and cultural identities and affiliations,
do complicate any simplistic description of Butler’s project in Good Scent. That is, Butler’s stories
and book present a somewhat traditional narrative of the immigrant experience,
of individuals and communities torn between an old and a new world, between a
past in Vietnam and a present in the United States, and with the war and its
effects as the pivot between those stages and worlds. That all makes sense and
is shared by many works (Vietnamese American and otherwise)—but it’s difficult
to read Nguyen’s novel without recognizing that such categories are far from
stable, and that the worlds, times, roles, and identities of any individual
life tend much more to blend together than to occupy distinct spots or stages. Very
few Vietnamese American immigrants can or should be seen as spies or moles, of
course—that way lies the logic of internment—but, like all immigrants and
really like every one of us, they are connected to multiple, often
contradictory identities and legacies. Nguyen’s brilliant novel forces us to
confront that challenging but crucial truth.
Special post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?
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