Facing the facts of life
Albert Read
THEY WHISPER by Robert Olen Butler Secker, f14.99, pp. 329 When a novel promises it will `unflinchingly and lyrically address the sub- ject of modern heterosexuality' you can't help flinching a bit yourself. Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, has made these extravagant claims with his new novel, They Whisper, and, in some respects, they are borne out — only that is all he does write about: 329 pages of unflinching and lyrical sex. Nothing else.
What we have is an absurd catalogue of sexual conquests through which the narra- tor, Ira Holloway, moves back and forth at breakneck speed — a different hard-on for every paragraph. There is the first, ten-year old love: Karen Granger, Ira's very own Rosebud, whose feet he watches in the X-ray machine in the shoe shop; then, in no particular order, along come Jane, Blos- som McCoy, Vietnamese prostitutes (Gio, Hue and Hoa), Thai massage girls (Xau), Rebecca Mueller, Sam, an unidentified topless woman in a park in Zurich, and many others whose appearances are too fleeting to mention. Ira also has a wife, Fiona, who, not surprisingly, is tormented by therapists and haunted by religion. As it is, her sombre rantings are a bonus: her descent into full Catholic madness provides our only real respite from her husband's sexual rhapsodies. Space and time are fluid: Ira leaps continents and juggles decades, prompted by little things like the smell of the soap ill his bathroom. It is written in the first per- son (except for some bizarre passages in italics written by the women) — one seam- less sexy stream of consciousness. There are no chapter headings, there's no coming up for air. The landscape of Ira's life is delineated by all the women he has loved. He sees no fault in himself; like a French- man, he just loves what it is that is a woman. The narrative is driven almost completely by these sex scenes and the self- centred ruminations that punctuate them:
I am conscious of my penis sometimes when
a faint shudder runs through it like a sigh, and I think: this part is me. My penis is more me than anything else. It is the gathering and the thrumming of me.
It clearly takes a lot to make Butler flinch. Ira's more tender, loving moments, if not as erotically charged as they might be, are written with detailed care and, admittedly, variety for a 329-page unremittingly sexual marathon.
The passion, however, falls flat. One man's sex life, written in this subjective, obsessive way can never sustain a novel on its own. By using characters as a vehicle for sex rather than sex as a vehicle for charac- terisation, Butler distances the reader from the proceedings. Rather than a profound examination of sexuality, this is like looking at someone else's holiday photographs: you smile and look interested, but you know that to really appreciate it, to fully under- stand the sublime experience, you should have been there.
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