The Deuce

In The Deuce, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler's searing sixth novel, the intertwined legacies of Vietnam and America are explored in the startlingly fresh voice of a young Amerasian boy, Tony Hatcher. At age six, Tony is snatched away from Saigon and his bar-girl mother and brought to the United States by his American father, a former Army officer, not a district attorney. For ten years, Tony grows up as ill at ease amid the affluence of the new jersey shore as he had been as one of the despised mixed-blood 'children of dust' in Saigon. And in America he has not escaped the stress and the stigma of embodying two seemingly irreconcilable cultures; that conflict rages within him, particularly as he becomes a teenager.