They Whisper
By Robert Olen Butler
Henry Holt, 333 pages, $22.50
Robert Olen Butler’s ambitious, risky new novel is the rhapsodically uninhibited memoir of Ira Holloway, a 35-year-old man obsessed by the sexual encounters of his past. Proclaiming his compulsion “to tell the truth about my life in this body of mine, and I have to tell it in the ways that it really happens, through my senses,” he sets out to confront just about every symbolic nuance of sexual intimacy between men and women: sex as the most authentic knowledge of the hidden self; sex as a foretaste of death, as rebirth, as transubstantiation; sex as a struggle between joy and sin; sex as a realm of communion in which language fails us.
Incest, war, adultery, martyrdom, paternal love, divine desire and Catholicism all play roles in Ira’s story, as do, ostensibly, the voices of the women he has loved. Anyone who read “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” the collection of stories that won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, knows Butler to be a masterly ventriloquist and a spinner of tales at once lyrical, humorous and acutely moving. Readers of his previous six books also know his skill at constructing suspenseful, psychologically absorbing novels-serious, satisfying books one simply can’t put down.
Though Butler speaks in a new, more expansive voice in the opening pages of “They Whisper,” one recognizes with pleasure familiar landmarks from earlier books. With his usual knack for sensuous detail, Butler catapults the reader from a 1950s Wabash, Ill., shoestore (where Ira experiences his earliest sexual yearnings as he X-rays a girl’s foot) to a Saigon massage parlor (where, as an intelligence officer fluent in Vietnamese, he is a darling among the girls, who greet him with quips such as “How you’ve grown, Mr. I!”), then back to Wabash (where the bookish adolescent Ira, overlooked by the opposite sex, decides to investigate the female mystery by sneaking into the girls’ restroom at the high school after hours and reading the graffiti). With equal pleasure, we see that Butler will again tackle the vagaries of language itself, as he did with such insight in “A Good Scent.”
Unfortunately, “They Whisper” falls short of its promise, in part because its early sense of humor evaporates along the way, but more significantly because its narrative and narrator seem ultimately adrift. Because a stated theme here is the intimate knowledge of other people-that grasping of the Other, be it another culture or another gender, that haunts all of Butler’s writing-we look forward to understanding Ira Holloway, the man as a whole, through his erotic psyche. But for all his emotional confessions, Ira remains a cipher.
At first he appears to be an empathic connoisseur of femininity, marveling at the “great metropolis of women” inhabiting his soul. He professes a sexual clairvoyance, an ability to hear these women’s “ontological whisperings” while making love to them. As he catalogs his memories, however, Ira begins to seem more like a consumer than a connoisseur, a man who needs to bed nearly every woman he meets, who is deaf to the expressions of anything but her vagina.
“Touching and kissing and entering that part of a woman,” he claims, “is so I can find my way to her voice, her secret voice, so I can hear it in my head.” Belying that assertion, few of the women we meet seem psychologically distinct, and their soliloquies are mostly indistinguishable in tone from Ira’s own voice.
The glimpses we have of Ira clothed-as a public relations man, as the only child of estranged parents, as an unhappily married father-do not fully clarify how he became so “ravished with love for this center of a woman’s body,” how a woman’s orgasm becomes “the cry that said there was a future before me, there was a future full of women I would love, women I would yearn for and leap with and rise to and give and give and dream with and that was what had always quickened me, what had given me this keen presence in the world.”
His desire, so earnestly rendered, feels flat; he lacks, for instance, the self-deprecating macho of Jim Harrison’s heroes or the reflective angst that shadows Andre Dubus’ stories of love and lust-in short, any counterweight to his compulsions. Ira is no Don Juan-his women are not conquests-but his reverence begins to seem suspiciously like camouflage as we read page after page of this generic woman-worship, and the expressively documented sex grows monotonous.
Outside this roiling sea of sex, Ira seems to have no idea who he is. Repeatedly, he attempts to justify his sentimentality by reiterating his mission “to understand why my life is so powerfully compelled by soft touching, joined flesh, complex parts of a self unseen,” but the mission is never fulfilled. “Mr. I” cannot outrun his ego.
Central among Ira’s women is his wife, Fiona, a fragile creature whose purported intelligence and charm are fleeting at best. Cued by various portents, such as pointed references to Van Gogh, we sense early on that her dark wound-sexual violation by her father-will blossom into something more than garden-variety neurosis.
Ira, curiously benumbed for a man who claims such compassion, watches almost passively as her eccentricities escalate. Even when Ira remains with Fiona only to protect their young son, one finds it doubtful that he could tolerate repeated frenzies involving “three hours of struggle . . . Fiona raging and frothing at the mouth”-or one wishes that he would at least look deeper within to comprehend his inaction.
Is “They Whisper” the erotic memoir we expected or the dissection of a dysfunctional, abusive relationship? About halfway through the book, I began to anticipate that Ira, like the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” might turn out to be a master of protective self-deception. Perhaps Ira’s grandiose litany would disintegrate and reveal the link between his celebratory sexual obsessions and his torturous marriage. This does not occur, however; and while the heavily foreshadowed climax is not implausible, it exempts Ira from confronting the moral dilemmas in his life as a husband and father.
For Butler, the language of sex becomes another obsession, and some of his attempts to transcend its limitations-its vacillation between the clinical and the vulgar-are astute and amusing (a reverie, for instance, on the anatomy of Fiona’s navel). But once the story grows deadly serious, all playfulness goes out the window, and with it any chance of breaking the linguistic barriers that Ira so rightly ridicules.
“They Whisper” does contain some affecting vignettes, evoking with pungent immediacy the smells and sounds of places as diverse as a Wabash trailer park and a Thai whorehouse. At all times, we know exactly where we are. We do not always, unfortunately, know why we are there.
Let it not be overlooked that Butler has been daring, first perhaps for entering the hallowed terrain of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. Male lust, in fact, is no benign topic at a moment when neo-Puritan schoolmarms police our culture from both left and right. But Butler’s courage does not redeem the frustrations encountered in “They Whisper,” a book that might be seen as an aberration-even a necessary exorcism-in the ongoing career of a brilliant writer.
