The Deuce

Very near fine in a like dustjacket. SIGNED hardcover first edition - New York:: Simon & Schuster,, 1989.. SIGNED hardcover first edition -. Very near fine in a like dustjacket.. First printing. Sixth novel by this Pulitzer prize winning author - an unusual coming-of-age novel, the story of an Amerasian boy, now 16, half Vietnamese, but brought up in the US by his American father, formerly an army officer, now a district attorney. SIGNED on the title page . 303 pp.

Somewhere inside this terribly overwritten novel about a runaway Vietnamese-American adolescent is an affecting sketch struggling to breathe free. Tony Hatcher (born Vo Dihn Thanh) lives in New Jersey with his emotionally distant self-absorbed ex-GI father, and is torn between his rootless present and memories of a boyhood in Saigon where his mother, a prostitute, abandoned him. Running away from home at 16, Tony winds up in New York City, fending for himself in a nightmarish world of crime, drugs, whores and panhandlers. He becomes friends with an alcoholic Vietnam War vet, but a knife-wielding, smooth-talking hustler spells trouble. When Tony's father plasters Port Authority bus terminal with missing-person posters, we know some form of confrontation is in store, but the prolix first-person voice that Butler ( The Alleys of Eden ) assigns to narrator Tony fails to build momentum and never fully convinces.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.