You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt,

and today my guest is Robert Olin Butler.

He's the author most recently of the Deep Green Sea.

Previously, tabloid dreams,

They Whisper, A Good Sent from a Strange Mountain,

for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and several novels before that.

Now, the new book, The Deep Green Sea, continues many of the themes to be found in the Robert

Olin Butler canon or corpus. And one of those is the obsession with an abandoned child or a missing child,

a concern that has recurred both in the American and the Vietnamese novels. And it seems to me to be one of several obsessions that govern

the ongoing work. I wondered if you would talk about that a bit.

It's always good to interview with you, Michael, because you always pick up on some absolutely

wonderful and valid motifs in the work that I hadn't given a lot of thought to, but

you're absolutely correct about that.

Then it goes back to On Distant Ground and beyond some of the earlier novels as well.

I don't know quite where it all came from.

I'm a father of one son who's now out here in L.A. and working in the film business.

And it was, as a father, I found that sense of protectiveness and deep attention to the child

...