SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Seeing the Vietnamese.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (29 March 1992): 3, 7.

In the following review, Eder compliments Butler's portrayal of Vietnamese people in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, drawing attention to his skillful evocation of the characters' sense of loss.

For the Vietnamese immigrants in Robert Olen Butler's stories, distance is sentient. It buzzes inside them like a crossed telephone line, a haunting syncopation under the forthright American rhythms they are trying to learn.

Butler's Vietnamese live, for the most part, in waterside communities in Louisiana: Lake Charles, Gretna, Versailles. The author himself lives and teaches in Lake Charles. Ever since he went to Saigon in 1971 as an Army linguist, he found his personal and literary vocation—unlike other writers there—less in exploring what it felt like to be an American in Vietnam than in what it felt like to Vietnam to have Americans...