Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Tabloid Dreams’:

Inquiring Minds

Book feature by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/29/96

Robert Olen Butler published six serious literary novels over twelve years, to critical acclaim and meager sales. Then he got a Pulitzer for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of interconnected stories about the struggles of Vietnamese refugees. Fame and fortune (or at least screenwriting contracts) ensued.

Now for something completely different: stories torn from today’s headlines, specifically from supermarket-tabloid headlines.

In the hands of a less expert fantasist, Butler’s new collection, Tabloid Dreams (Holt) might have ended up a glorified writer’s-workshop exercise. God knows, tabloid-spoofing (as practiced by everyone from David Byrne to Jay Leno) might just be the laziest, most sophomoric form of “humor” writing ever invented. But Butler goes the other way, and treats his topics with total sincerity, if not total seriousnes.

Each of Butler’s 12 first-person vignettes takes its title from a tabloid cover story, then goes on to explore how the star-crossed protagonists of the stories might feel about their improbable situations. In every case, Butler depicts his heroes and heroines as fully drawn, fully sympathetic characters caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

Tabloid Dreams is soon to become a big HBO miniseries, with each story adapted by a different big-name director and screenwriter. But this is definitely a situation where you should read the book instead. It’s Butler’s writing that makes these stories work, the way his protagonists matter-of-factly state their peculiar experiences and then plead for the reader’s sympathy, expressing what a publisher’s blurb calls “the enduring issues of cultural, exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for the self.”

“Nine-Year Old Boy Is World’s Youngest Hitman,” the most realistic of Butler’s tales, comes toward the book’s center. It’s not all that far off from being a standard wasted-urban-youth melodrama save for the jaded antihero being six or seven years younger than the typical subjects of such pieces. The kid’s a street-smart sass in a Russian-immigrant part of Brooklyn who respects nobody and nothing but his gun, the only thing left behind by his disappeared dad.

“Woman Struck By Car Turns Into Nymphomaniac” ups the surrealism a notch, yet remains fully plausible as it introduces us to a New York PR agent jarred by the first truly intense physical experience of her life and drawn into seeking further adrenaline rushes via sex.

The book begins and ends with takes on the 1912 Titanic shipwreck, told in ice-water-on-freezing-skin detail. The first, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,” introduces us to an English gentleman who remembers patiently waiting for the rising water to reach him, while he smokes one final cigar and bids farewell to an American women’s-suffrage advocate whom he’d persuaded, against her as-tough-as-any-man bravado, onto a lifeboat. He “speaks” to us from a disembodied afterlife, as a spirit fated to flow eternally through the earth’s water cycle. In the last story he’s reunited (as bath water) with the suffragist, who tells her own time-traveling tale in “Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle.” She expresses little surprise about her lifeboat’s emergence in a later decade; but as she waits on her (female-captained) rescue ship to re-enter the world, she imagines the gains she’d fought for having been realized, and that the world of her future will therefore have no need for her: “I am certain in a world like this that women have the right to vote. And I am confident, too, that politicians have become honest and responsive, as a result. And if there is a woman ship captain and if we have been enfranchised, then I can even expect that there have been women presidents of the United States. It is selfish, but this makes me sad. It would have been better to have died in my own time.”

The collection’s other stories play like the better installments of The Twilight Zone, putting ordinary people into extraordinary situations that reveal their strengths and weaknesses. The heroine of “Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband” finds herself caught between the churning hell of her suspicions and the dread of how she’d react if she used the psychic power of her replacement organ to confirm them. The “Jealous Husband” who “Returns in Form of Parrot” is fully cognizant of his surroundings but is unable to speak more than a reflexive “Hello” while his widow fucks other men right outside his cage. The “Boy Born With Tattoo of Elvis” obsesses about his gift the way regular teens obsess about regular physical distinctions, worrying whether potential girlfriends will find it too freakish.

The great stories of any culture tend to involve characters in larger-than-life situations: A prophet swallowed by a big fish, a man who can swallow the sea, a woman made pregnant by a swan. Butler knows this, and so do the tabloid editors he took his themes from. If there’s a disconcerting aspect to Tabloid Dreams, it’s how Butler treats the original tabloid articles (which remain uncited and uncredited) as if they were old public-domain tales, free for him to retell with his own literary and sometimes upscaly spin. Somebody wrote (and probably fabricated) each of these titles. They ought to at least be recognized for it.

(Also by Butler: They Whisper, the erotically-charged tale of a Vietnam vet who dreams of hearing women’s souls speak to him, only to risk losing his own.)