Thrum to the melodies of art: Anthony Quinn talks to the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler is not exactly a household name in this country. But then he wasn't that well-known in his own, either, until he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction earlier this year. The man I greet in the hotel lobby is diminutive, fortysomething, American, and his twinkly demeanour somehow presages an enthusiastic interviewee - he's just got back from a talk with the World Service, and is due at the BBC again right after this.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Minerva pounds 5.99) is the book which has launched him into the major league. It's a collection of 15 stories about Vietnamese-Americans coming to terms with their adoptive country, and indirectly explores the legacy of the war. Butler worked as a translator with the United States Army in Vietnam in 1971, so he didn't lack for grass roots experience. He began writing on his return home, abandoning an earlier career in the theatre. 'Because I was in the theatre already I just shifted into playwriting and assumed that was my medium. I was dead wrong about that. It took me a dozen really bad plays to realise it.'

He then turned to fiction, no cakewalk either. Of his first efforts he cheerfully admits he would sooner 'burn them' than see them published. His fourth attempt at a novel was eventually accepted in 1981, since when he has published five more. 'Toward the end of my sixth I was called by National Public Radio and asked to contribute a short story to a series they were producing. I said of course, and went back to a bunch of old stories hoping there might be something salvageable, and they were even worse than I remembered.'

So he started from scratch, deciding to attempt a story in the voice of a Vietnamese-American. 'Six hours later I got up from my computer and, lo and behold I had a short story, and a good one. All of a sudden I understood the story as a dramatic monologue or soliloquy, and writing in the voice of a Vietnamese I had accessed material that had been stewing around in me for nearly two decades.' Fourteen more stories followed.

Butler now teaches creative writing at the university in Lake Charles, Louisiana, an area which saw a great influx of Vietnamese immigrants in the years following the fall of Saigon in April 1975. As someone who was 'over there' he seems a fellow of irrepressible good cheer, on the surface at least. He is not the dazed and depressed vet of Nam lore. He is, in fact, a rarity: an American deeply enchanted by the Vietnamese people. 'I was close to them because I could speak the language and because they are as a group the most open, generous-spirited people in the world. My interest in and respect for them was instantly taken up and extravagantly returned. These people were as close to me as I've ever known.'

This reciprocated affection notwithstanding, one feels compelled to ask - did he feel any moral unease being there in the first place? 'It was a very complex situation,' Butler says, groping for words (evidently an unusual condition for him). 'I wasn't there voluntarily, but I didn't take drastic measures to avoid it. At the age of 26 I didn't want to go to prison or into exile. My political consciousness then was not black and white, nor could it ever have been. The closer you got to the Vietnamese the more difficult the situation became.'

Despite 'moments of peril', Butler controlled his fate in so far as he was never in combat. 'I think we were in the wrong place doing the wrong thing, no question about that. But in 1945 it was impossible for our government - it still is - to distinguish between one Communist regime and another, whereas it takes any dictatorship paying the tiniest lip service to democracy as something we should support. On both sides, pro-war, anti-war, isolationism or full intervention, whatever, it was too complex, and the forces that turn these issues into black and white certitudes just keep the spiral of foolishness going.'

The stories constitute a risky but well-sustained venture into the hearts and minds of immigrant Vietnamese. But they are not, he insists, an act of ventriloquy. 'I was more a kind of medium. These characters had their own voices - not one of them has a real-life counterpart. To paraphrase your great novelist Graham Greene, good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. They came to me insistently, and quite fully formed.' Women play a central role in at least half of the stories, and Butler is clearly proud of the fact that every woman who read the book and spoke to him remarked on 'the authenticity of the voice'.

The success of these impersonations has led to his next novel, They Whisper, out from Secker next March, and Butler is very keen to talk about it. The book recounts the crowded erotic history of its middle-aged narrator, and sounds like an ambitious work - 'it's about the nature of physical intimacy between men and women. It tries to locate the deepest nature of male yearning for women, a yearning that does not cease.'

Butler's publishers are excited about it too, hailing it as 'the sexiest book you've ever read'. Hmm. I wonder what Butler thinks of Updike, arch-satyr of suburban bed- hopping. 'He's one of the few male writers I can think of who's actually tried to get at the experience of sexuality, though other than Couples I can't think of an Updike novel where the basic aesthetic province is sex. His eye has always been on the culture and the forces of ambition in a broader societal way. With They Whisper the vision is entirely focused on what sexuality is, and that's a difficult thing.'

Butler is not one to shrink from lofty theorising on the business of novel-writing, and once in expository mode he assumes an unstoppable (and emphatic) fluency: 'Novelists are in the same business as the priests. We're all trying to figure out answers to the big cosmic questions. But I have a strongly held opinion about art as a sensual medium; the experience of a work of art is irreducible. One comes to it not in order to derive an idea or a philosophy or attitude, rather one experiences it as a kind of resonance or harmonic - you thrum to a work of art.'

A brief pause for breath: he's well into his stride now. 'Artists are secular theologians of sorts, in the same way that Jesus was the first great novelist. He taught in no way but parables - the New Testament is quite emphatic about that - so there is a tradition of getting at the deepest issues through storytelling. And he got really pissed off at Peter - the first literary critic, see? - for demanding he explain these things in other terms.'

Phew. After this kind of aria you may think that the Pulitzer Prize is the least thing they could have given him. Butler's stories are melodious and nuanced - you may even thrum to them - and the award, it's heartening to note, has gone to a properly appreciative winner. 'One thing about the Pulitzer is that people read you for reasons they're not really clear on. I did a book signing in Lake Charles, which you have to understand is right in the middle of the Cajun Roman Catholic South. Now the book is a collection of 14 stories and a 20,000-word novella. A woman, very enthusiastic, came up to me and said, 'I can't wait to read your book, but do I understand this correctly, it consists of 14 stories and a novena?' ' Amen to that.

(Photograph omitted)