They Whisper - Softcover

Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his tales of Vietnamese in the Louisiana bayou, Good Scent from a Strange Mountain , shifts his attention to sex. His narrator, Ira Holloway, must "wrestle with the profound mystery of [his] attraction to women." The real mystery is why Butler, who delivered such a straightforward tale of homelessness in The Deuce (1989), has suddenly discovered the prose poem and gone gaga over vaginas, nipples, armpits, navels, and--particularly--toes. If there's a story here at all, it's one of obsession: as a schoolboy, Ira sneaks into the girls' restroom after hours. He writes testimonials concerning his sexual prowess (and sensitivity) on the stall doors, attributing them to the various objects of his fantasies. His graffiti is witty and forms a transition into the most interesting aspect of They Whisper: the stream-of-consciousness "I" of Ira that becomes the "I" of various women, yielding a novel told from many points of view. Butler's women are vivid, although they invariably people "the other"; Ira's lover, Fiona, emerges as his most significant other, becoming his wife and a mother to his son. She concludes the novel, { }a la Molly Bloom, in a soliloquy to the spirituality of sex--she is in love with Jesus, a sexual Jesus. There are many such strange and marvelous passages in Butler's novel, but Ira never solves his mystery, and Butler never manages to tell a story. John Mort

'A profound, disturbing and important book' Washington Post; 'They Whisper, Butler's first novel since his Pulitzer prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, is nothing less than a meditation on the spiritual nature of sexuality - its mystical power and its deep connection to death. In this, it is closer to the spirit of Blake than to that of Joyce, though its style is deliberately Joycean. Like all fundamentalists, Ira allows no other god. His incantations have the thythmic repetition of long prayers... And Ira, while singing out his joy in sexual encounters with the prostitutes of Vietnam, or in his erotic tableaux of actual and imagined lovers, embodies that notion of the ecstatic. Real life slips away when Ira contemplates his goddess, who - whatever her shape, race or age - is always Aphrodite' Washington Post