This is about the effect of the war on an American family told decades after the war ended. Butler has a true knack for the way people think and talk: how we say one thing even as we are thinking another. One brother served in Vietnam and one brother fled to Canada. They’re both around 70 now and the book is about their relationship and their relationships to their parents. Very well done. A far better book than A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. As someone who remembers that period vividly, I found it moving, evocative, and true. ( )

Pulitzer Prize winning author

This book is not about Vietnam as much as it is about how war can affect individuals and families, fathers and sons. Butler explores a number of questions that remain after any war, but particularly after Vietnam, one being what does it mean to those men who actually fought it. Was it worth the losses and sacrifices? What constitutes bravery? cowardice? How much of what we do in life is driven by our desire to live up to the expectations of our parents? At what point is it a braver act to stand up to a parent, or to follow one's convictions, than to blindly follow the path that has been set out for you?

Vietnam was the war of my generation. I knew the men who fought it, and without exception, it changed them. I could easily relate to both Robert and Jimmy, the sons of World War II vet, William. It was a complicated time and it left scars on the American psyche. I do not think we were ever the same afterward. Butler has captured that dichotomy and the lingering effects on families perfectly. Beautifully written; surprisingly realistic. ( )

Such a shallow book, this. A better title might have been The Unbearable Lightness of Being Quinlans. For the novel is so earnest and attempts to be so very deep but only gets around to posing cliched questions of old age.

And age is another matter. This book is populated by geriatrics acting like they are 19 years old. There appears to be only two stages in life, old age and unrelenting memories of Vietnam, war protests, and the 1960s. It's all so tiresome. These people never reflect on anything that occurred in the intervening 46 years between their youth and their aged existence in 2015. But they are good at endlessly eating, sipping tea, and drinking coffee, especially Robert with his damned gourmet Ethiopian beans he obsesses over. And they are excellent at moaning over their comfortable middle class existence. It's as if that 1970 film, Getting Straight, with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, was suddenly brought to the 21st century, with all the humor and comedy sucked out of it.

Of the writing style? It pretends. It attempts. And it fails to reflect the fracturing and fragmentation of contemporary life. Instead, it becomes an oafish, hamfisted play in shifting narrative.

One thing this novel did convince me of is that we should abolish academic tenure. That would have rid us all of the insipid Robert and Darla. And perhaps the tedium of being faced with the work of the author of this work of low end academic fiction. ( )

I read this because my husband and I have planned a trip to Vietnam and his earlier book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, was recommended as reading. So I was a bit disappointed more of this wasn't set in Vietnam - my problem not his!

My husband is a Vietnam vet, so it was interesting to read accounts of how that now distant war affected the various characters.

Very good writing; however his style, to me, grew a bit monotonous toward the end. ( )