SOURCE: Bonner, Thomas. Review of The Deep Green Sea, by Robert Olen Butler. America 178, no. 21 (20 June 1998): 31.

In the following review, Bonner offers a plot overview of The Deep Green Sea, commending Butler's development of an ensemble cast, but criticizing the book's lack of action.

Vietnam has entered the U.S. literary and historical imagination with nearly as strong a force as the Civil War. Major American writers like William Faulkner have used the Civil War to probe the transformation of a Southern self into an American one. Most recently, Charles Frazier in his novel Cold Mountain revives the Civil War more for its metaphorical possibilities and less for its own sake.

Although the Vietnam War lies too close in time for any significant romanticizing to have obscured the pain, it has continued to be a journalistic subject of numerous historical studies and the focus of much fiction. Most...