Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler
This novel is, like all Butler novels I've read, beautifully written. The main character here is Robert Quinlan, a seventy-year-old history professor at Florida State University. His wife Darla is also a professor at FSU, she teaches art theory and is working on a paper about Daughters of the Confederacy Monuments. They live in a Craftsman house that they built with an inheritance from Darla's parents years ago.
As the novel opens, they cross paths with a homeless man while eating a buffet dinner, and Robert buys him the meal and has a short conversation. The man, also named Bob, decides that the cold weather warrants a long walk to a shed behind a church, a place he knows is always left open to those who might need it.
Robert had mistaken Bob for a Vietnam veteran, forgetting just how long ago that war was, and this error takes him back to his own youth, and his time in Vietnam and he considers why he went and what he did, particularly on one particular night.
Robert has a brother Jimmy that chose a different path. Jimmy went to Canada, and their father William disowned him. Now their father is close to death and choosing to give unasked-for opinions. And their mother Peggy has somehow got hold of Jimmy's phone number and wants Robert to talk to him.
This is a story of family, of fathers and sons, of expectations and resentments, There is also a theme of war that arises. A book that made me sit and think for a while.
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