SOURCE: Linfield, Susie. “Speed Read.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (25 January 1998): 4.

In the following review, Linfield criticizes The Deep Green Sea for rehashing themes Butler has previously addressed, such as erotic love, suicide, the Vietnam War, and memory.

The Deep Green Sea opens with Le Thi Tien, a 26-year-old Vietnamese girl, in bed with Benjamin Cole, a 48-year-old American vet. They are strangers, and they make love: the passionate, earth-moving, life-shattering kind. Tien has told Ben three things: that she is a virgin; that her mother, who was a prostitute, is dead; and that her father, whom she never met and who was an American GI, is also deceased. The first two statements are lies. The last one, which she fervently believes—it is, in fact, the sun around which her emotional life revolves—will also turn out to be untrue. And it will set the stage for...