THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701130198
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE
LENGTH: 63 lines
TABLOID DREAMS
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
Henry Holt. 203 pp. $22.50.
With his brilliant new book of stories, Tabloid Dreams, Robert Olen Butler takes readers into a literary twilight zone where irrationality and reason walk hand in hand, and the impossible becomes plausible. Tabloid headlines provide Butler with the basis for the dozen pieces that comprise his first story collection since A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.
Titles like ``Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover'' and ``Woman Loses Cookie Bake-off, Sets Self on Fire'' might lead readers to expect a surreal ride from the tales in Tabloid Dreams, but this is no freak show. Butler's stories have a sentiment and grace that transcend the kitschy headlines. His prose style - incantatory, river-long sentences that unwind smoothly into paragraphs - is appropriately dreamy, and the first person voices he conjures are original and convincing.
However, there is something weird going on here. Pieces such as ``Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed'' and ``Nine-Year-Old Boy is World's Youngest Hit Man'' are roughly summarized in their titles, but Butler infuses each with a narrative consciousness that tells the story behind the unlikely headlines. And the stories are oddly believable: ``This time a couple of people see me and they can't believe their eyes,'' 9-year-old Wally says after committing a murder, ``. . . and I'm glad they can see me, in a way. This is what a man can look like sometimes. Like me.''
Transformations of this subtle sort occur in nearly all of Butler's stories, and, at times, the metamorphosis is more literal. ``Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot'' and ``Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac'' feature characters who are altered physically, and gain a clearer vision of themselves and the world as a result. Their titles may sound absurd, but these narratives - like the rest in the collection - possess the shadow and complexity that are the requisites of great fiction.
Butler achieves this complexity, in part, by inhabiting his fictional world with people who hover on the brink of connection and love, who are haunted by their own mortality. ``How can you protect yourself from passion?'' asks the narrator of a story called ``Every Man She Kisses Dies.'' ``And if you can protect yourself, how can it be passion? Must passion be gone from this world forever?'' These are questions worth ruminating in the age of AIDS, and they help authenticate the world of Tabloid Dreams in spite of the unreal events that occur there. It is a world that feels real, a place where a rare moment of clarity can alter a life, and what might be is more precious than what actually is.
Surprisingly, this collection is cyclical, a full circle of stories that overlap and ripple and end in echoes. The book is so tightly and successfully conceived that it possesses a novelesque unity. Robert Olen Butler has formed such a graceful loop from his latest group of stories that Tabloid Dreams itself seems nothing less than an act of magic. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for ``A Good Scent
From A Strange Mountain.''