Anticipation and Dread: Robert Olen Butler's Fiction

reflection on HAD A GOOD TIME: Stories from American Postcards by Robert Olen Butler (Grover Press, 2004).

I'm always a little afraid when I start to read fiction by Robert Olen Butler. I know he's going to draw me into a corner of our world made strange in some wonderful way through a character's eyes. I know that he'll surprise me. I also know that, looking back on the story or novel, I'll see that the surprise was inevitable, usually implied from the start. I know well the feeling of delighted anticipation that often grows as we approach the climax. But I also know its opposite, a feeling of strong dread that makes me regret having started in the first place.

Most wonderfully, Butler's fiction often builds towards something dreadful that turns into a something joyful, surprising, and still inevitable. That worked on a grand scale in his novel MR. SPACEMAN, and repeatedly in short stories, which are his specialty.

What I've described sounds perhaps like a formula, along the lines of O'Henry, and Butler's work is anything but formulaic. More than any creative artist I know (besides Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard), he keeps challenging himself to wring quality from unlikely sources. In this collection from 2004, HAD A GOOD TIME, each story is his extrapolation from actual postcards from the 1890s to 1920s. An earlier collection TABLOID DREAMS took off from headlines he found in the National Enquirer, and one of those stories, "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover" was the basis of his novel MR. SPACEMAN. The collection that I read first was A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN, in which every story concerns Vietnamese immigrants living in the area of New Orleans.

I'm still working on my own interpretation of something he remarked in the radio interview that brought him to my attention back around 1990. The interviewer pointed out that Butler, a Vietnam War veteran, had been labeled as a "political writer." Butler agreed that his writing was political, but not in the way that people usually mean. Parties, policies, and beliefs, he said, are all superficial signs of any person's political core, which he says is much deeper, established very early in life.

If I were to try to put Butler's creed into words, it would be like my own effort to define Sondheim's creed. It would have something to do with deep empathy, understanding even repulsive people. Get beyond class, race, groups, careers, beliefs - and you reach the unique and valuable person. The Christ-like alien in MR. SPACEMAN prepares himself to reveal the truth of our universe by walking among us, trying to experience our daily grind, and by using a brain scanner to inhabit the stories of people he plucks up from Louisiana to his spaceship. I'm reminded of an emblematic line from Flannery O'Connor, "Even the meanest among them sparkled."

Another element of his creed would be that violence never achieves its perpetrators' real objective.

So it's with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I'm going to look for his latest collection, SEVERANCE, which grows from his most daunting, least promising, challenge to himself: Each story is what goes through the mind of an individual during the estimated ninety seconds of consciousness left when the head has been severed from the body.