‘Intercourse’ explores thoughts of the moment
“Intercourse,”
by Robert Olen Butler (Chronicle Books, 216 pages. $22.95)
No serious writer in America works with a lighter touch than Robert Olen Butler.
That sure hand, guided by a potent creative intelligence, saves books like “Tabloid Dreams” (1996), inspired by supermarket weekly headlines, from mere whimsy.
Butler seemed to approach the limits of these gifts with his last collection, “Severance” (2006), 62 monologues capturing the dying thoughts of decapitated people – John the Baptist, Ann Boleyn, Jane Mansfield among them – via intense bursts of unpunctuated imagery.
But in his latest, he pushes the conceit even further. “Intercourse” conveys the thoughts of people (and in one instance, chickens) in the act of copulation.
On one page comes the monologue of one participant, on the facing page his or her partner’s. That the two are pressed together when you close the book is a nice little bonus.
Butler removes the safety net altogether by not confining himself to historical and mythical couplings – he starts with Adam and Eve, ends with Santa Claus and an 826-year-old elf named Ingebiritta.
He boldly includes real people, some still living: Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, George and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton. This opens the author to charges of exploitation and invasion of privacy, and indeed, some in Britain have bitterly complained on Diana’s behalf.
It soon grows clear that Butler is after more than the small game of clashing sexual expectations. Passion is little addressed in these pages, and the characters seldom pay much attention to matters at hand. These monologues are less a replication of actual carnal states of mind than a distillation of character, probed in a sexual context.
The tenderest moments come between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (“my Lovey is the plumpest manmuscled genius of any of them”), and a divorced couple serendipitously reunited (“I want to kiss his hand and I imagine these past few years unwinding”).
When I read “Severance,” I wondered what made its pieces stories instead of the prose poems they so much resemble.
Butler himself has since offered an answer: “To be brief,” he writes in Narrative Magazine.com, “it is a story and not a prose poem because it has at its center a character who yearns.”“Intercourse” is not the book for erotic titillation, but for human yearning, it is unsurpassed.