The Deuce, covering the conflicts of an Amerasian teenager, fits well with several of Butler's other novels. The Alleys of Eden (1981; see separate entry) is set half in Saigon and half in the U.S., and follows the relationship of an American soldier and a Vietnamese bar girl—in some ways paralleling a background relationship in The Deuce. Similarly, On Distant Ground (1985; see separate entry) follows an American soldier back to Saigon to find a former lover and her son in the closing days of the Republic of South Vietnam.

Among Butler's works which do not draw on the Vietnam experience, Wabash (1987), set in rural depression-era Illinois, features a woman who works to understand why her mother and aunts have broken their relation with their sister who has turned Catholic—paralleling in The Deuce Tony's struggle to understand and accept the divisions in his...