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They Whisper
Recalling all the women he has ever loved, public relations man Ira Holloway explores his sexuality and the profound hold it has on him. By the author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. 75,000 first printing.
333 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
11 people are currently reading
374 people want to read
About the author
Robert Olen Butler
86 books452 followers“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
January 12, 2011
Paul Simon once famously wrote:
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single/ put them all together for one night/you know they'd never match my sweet imagination....
Every man in America knows exactly what he meant by that crisp understatement. Except maybe Robert Olen Butler, a man who as far as I can tell has no Kodachrome in him. Written in the first-person singular, this has an autobiographical quality. The result is creepy and not very good.
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single/ put them all together for one night/you know they'd never match my sweet imagination....
Every man in America knows exactly what he meant by that crisp understatement. Except maybe Robert Olen Butler, a man who as far as I can tell has no Kodachrome in him. Written in the first-person singular, this has an autobiographical quality. The result is creepy and not very good.
October 30, 2015
I ADORE this book. This is not the first time I've reread it. Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, takes us on alyrical journey into one man's erotic consciousness--a trip I'm happy to take over and over over again. When I feel a little too savage in my own mind, a little too brutal, I read it to restore a little tenderness in my own soul. A man's internal life -- full of memories of women, women he's loved, women he's only glanced briefly on a bus but never forgotten, memories hooked and brought to consciousness by the slightest smell, touch, bend in an ear… I find it exquisite--the poetry of men and their love of women, normally wordless, but given beautiful voice by Butler. A reader here says he would have been satisfied with a single line--but what a loss that would be.
October 23, 2013
After enjoying Butler's "Hell," I decided to go back and read some of his earlier work. The stream-of-consciousness style and completely internally driven plot may be off-putting to some, but it's delicious for a Faulkner lover like myself. There are few reading experiences I treasure more than immersing myself in the mind of a character. Butler masterfully takes the reader deep inside his main character, Ira Holloway, and into the minds of the many women he has loved.
The book jacket describes the work as "rapturously erotic." Its subject matter--Ira's contemplation of his relationship with women, both general and specific, as he looks back on his life from early middle age--might easily have devolved into the pornographic. But Butler manages to keep the prose sensual and literate, despite not shying away from graphic details and colloquial terminology for body parts. And there are deeper themes: what happens when the person you fall in love with changes in barely comprehensible ways? What are a parent's obligations to his child? What is the meaning of intimacy?
Butler has carried off what is, to my mind, one of the most challenging feats of an introspective, thematically driven work. He made me care deeply about the characters and wonder, as I soaked up the prose on each page, what would happen in the end.
The book jacket describes the work as "rapturously erotic." Its subject matter--Ira's contemplation of his relationship with women, both general and specific, as he looks back on his life from early middle age--might easily have devolved into the pornographic. But Butler manages to keep the prose sensual and literate, despite not shying away from graphic details and colloquial terminology for body parts. And there are deeper themes: what happens when the person you fall in love with changes in barely comprehensible ways? What are a parent's obligations to his child? What is the meaning of intimacy?
Butler has carried off what is, to my mind, one of the most challenging feats of an introspective, thematically driven work. He made me care deeply about the characters and wonder, as I soaked up the prose on each page, what would happen in the end.
August 4, 2012
This book was recommended to me by my psychologist. I can never stop thanking her. I have shared it with a number of women through the years, and after reading the reviews here I am not as disappointed as I had been that few of them "got it".
I was comforted by this book, it was nice to know that I am not totally unique in my introspection, expectations, and desires. It's not for everyone, but if you're interested in an alternative view of male sexuality it is wonderful.
I was comforted by this book, it was nice to know that I am not totally unique in my introspection, expectations, and desires. It's not for everyone, but if you're interested in an alternative view of male sexuality it is wonderful.
September 10, 2009
I can't do "stream of consciousness" writing. I need punctuation. And paragraphs.
Read
July 31, 2011His best book that I've read. A weird, honest, and deceptively simple—actually philosophically very complex—exploration of the male psyche. Here you get the whole Freudian/Sartrean problem of using sex and fear of death to fill the hole that modernism leaves where religion once was, twinned with a parallel exploration of the, or an, analogous female approach to the same problem. But it is not as pat as I make it sound here. Like Updike, it will seem misogynistic at first glance and is not to everyone's taste. I predict that whenever men and women read this book in tandem—as couples or in book groups, say—there will be awkward conversations in which females say, "But, seriously, that's exaggerated, right? Men don't really think about sex as much as that main character does, do they? They don't really use up that much brain space thinking about screwing everyone they see and obsessively cataloguing their past conquests ... right?"—at which point the men will stare at their feet and clear their throats before saying, "Yeah, of course ... exaggerated," and then change the subject.
The foot fetish thing that Butler has going on, though: that's just him. I swear.
The foot fetish thing that Butler has going on, though: that's just him. I swear.
June 5, 2012
thought every man should read it at least once in their life. I read it with the male side of me. amazing how he managed to quote such details. even the simplest of the things we ignore every now and then. although the book is not with me anymore, I love it!
February 15, 2017
An elegiac novel about the women the first-person narrator has “loved,” from a woman wordlessly passed on a train to his wife. Butler makes this fresh idea work most of the time, and the great range of the relationships (many of them in Vietnam during wartime) helps. The narrator’s marriage acts something like the novel’s core, with all the other women in his life spinning around it. There is some prose that I found excessive, and at times I grew tired of the wife and, sadly, of some of the repetition (I love repetition), but there is a great deal of beauty and fine writing in this novel. It isn't for everyone, but for those with an open mind, men and women, this is a special book.
October 19, 2018
The most erotic book I've ever read without the gory details (not that there's anything wrong with that). The main character, Ira, finds something in every woman he sees that he loves. The qualities in each of these women are not breasts or butts, they are the curve of an ear, the shape of an ankle...The character also relives conversations with women and imagines conversations that may happen or will happen. He's also intuitive about the thoughts and feelings of the women he loves. He's not incapable of loving deeply, but he is incapable of focusing on a single woman. He marries and the outcome is painful and ultimately disastrous for both of them. A great read.
November 26, 2011
After 20 years, "They Whisper" by Robert Olen Butler, is still tickling my brain. A sensual language narrates directly into your ear with graphic details of a former Vietnam vet whose memory slips back-n-forth, flashing a burning desire for these former exotic lovers. Finding a perfect woman to match his taste is a task, but the miracle turns into a nightmare with the birth of a child. A playful wife strips her sexuality, becoming a church lady. The ending leaves you on the cliff, but I welcome reader's imagination to fill the gap. Great read, masterfully written!
April 27, 2012
I read this book several years ago. I was attracted to its blurb about sex so I decided to read it without knowing more. There are boring times with this book but there are a lot of beautiful poetic passages that made me smile. It is a books for people who had had many lovers in their lives and these lovers still whisper to them in their daydreams, their thoughts or in times when one is bored or has nothing else to do. We miss them, and when we do, they whisper like faint memories wanting to glimmer back to existence. They whisper, and we listen with aching hearts.
I will definitely reread this again because I had fond times with this book. I will study the writing style which was stream-of-consciousness confessional type of writing because I was amazed on how good Butler was able to pull it off.
I will definitely reread this again because I had fond times with this book. I will study the writing style which was stream-of-consciousness confessional type of writing because I was amazed on how good Butler was able to pull it off.
February 22, 2015
I love Robin Olen Butler, but could not get into this one. I enjoyed the Granite City (Wabash) beginning….but as it progressed my sentiments were "Don't fall in love with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder".
September 11, 2011
Reading this book is like reading a long lyrical poem.
April 8, 2012
Very interesting take on love. I think the ending was the best part :)
January 9, 2020
Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and in that fact alone, I found it to be compelling but, truth be told, for me, there was a lot of disconnect - and I am not talking about the writing style. Ira Holloway (or "way hollow"), who, by all accounts was a womanizer and had a number of character flaws (e.g. both literally and figuratively cheating on his wife) was seen via internal dialogue as some kind of God's gift to women. The internal dialogue of the women painted him almost as saintly (ugh). And, I have to say, that as a woman, the internal dialogue they had did not at all resonant with me. I have never heard women refer to certain body parts as the character Ira seems to think we do..... (I don't want to give examples). I finished the book only because I took it on vacation with me and had nothing else - and was going to leave it behind in any case (which I did). I will say that there were some insightful moments but other than an occasional flash of "yeah - that is a good way to see that" or "I never knew that about the culture of Vietnam" it was challenging to stay focused and I really could not care about the main character. Actually, none of the characters were developed enough to even begin to care about and Ira was just monochromatic (i.e. sex obsessed). EDIT: Other reviewers said this book was "creepy". I would agree!!!
August 12, 2025
Horny guy. Foot fetish off the bat. Vietnam War. Bad. But love all the women from Vietnam! Meet Fiona post war. She not like other girls. No girls are like other girls! Everyone’s different. Fiona psycho jealous crazy girl. (Just like me fr). Blah blah blah he was a slut and she was a slut but she’s mad that he was a slut. Also apparently he’s a great fuck or at least he thinks he is. Very interested to know actually how this story went down from Fiona’s perspective, not just his interpretation of her perspective. Yada yada marriage pregnancy child. She is actually crazy. He still thinks about all the bitches from the past. He loves his kid. Hates his wife. But still loves his wife? But falls in love with other women. Wife goes off the deep end and turns to religion. Gets weirdly very religious towards the end but I guess that’s the vibe?
LOTS of run on sentences. And not very engaging ones either…
Idk this book was very fine. 2.5 stars. Don’t rly recommend but better to read than spend time on my phone ykwim
LOTS of run on sentences. And not very engaging ones either…
Idk this book was very fine. 2.5 stars. Don’t rly recommend but better to read than spend time on my phone ykwim
August 9, 2018
This book's biggest mystery is how its protagonist, one Ira Holloway (who is self-admittedly "way hollow," in more ways than one) can basically be god's gift to women and yet also sport a monobrow. Or is it unibrow? Either way, can that really be attractive--to anyone? It's never explained here, but unless it's some kind of inside joke on Butler's part, it's apparently taken for granted that the single, caterpillar-like eyebrow on a dude is indeed somehow a turn-on. But the several times it's mentioned, it just gave me the willies.
I found the story ultimately interesting, and even something of an achievement, but along the way it struck me as alternately ridiculous--as when Ira "falls in love" with the automated female voice that issues over the grocery store checkout register telling his multiple purchases are 69 cents, 69, 69, 69... or when he "falls in love" with the recorded female voice on the foreign-language tapes he's listening to to learn Vietnamese--to occasionally annoying, the latter in part because of that very repetitive misconstruance of infatuation, lust, or obsession for love and in part for the pretty steady rationalization for his licentiousness.
In any case, our narrator, Ira the ladies' man, has a secret power, see: He can "hear" or intuit women's secretest thoughts, sort of like Mel Gibson in "What Women Want" except in much more graphic, long-winded detail. These are the titular "whispers," and they purportedly come not from the minds but the vaginas of the myriad women he's either fantasized about or actually bedded. (And now that I consider it, I'm pretty sure Butler uses every word for that part of the female anatomy except vagina.) And these whispers are presented as italicized, stream-of-consciousness incerpts that sometimes run on for pages throughout the narrative, which is otherwise unbroken by anything as pedestrian as chapters--just a solid outpouring of text for 330+ pages, which in a way is a neat feat but at times seems not so reader friendly.
In Ira's defense (I guess), he's mated with the emotionally chaotic Fiona Price, who at best is delicately balanced but usually just seems totally imbalanced and in any case exacts a high cost on Ira's soul.
There definitely are poetic, or at least poignant, moments, as when Ira locks eyes with a woman who's on a subway going the opposite way of his and neither turn away in that fleeting moment--which is long enough for her whispering to ensue. And the development of the relationship between Ira and his son, John, is refreshing in the midst of everything else devoted pretty exclusively to Ira's almost insatiable sex drive and celebration of his formidable phallus and its many conquests. There is even real tension at the book's climax, which both is and isn't a double entendre.
By the end, I did appreciate Butler's sustained vision--such stamina!--but the book still left me feeling like I needed to take a shower.
First line:
"Even before I knew there was another part of girls that would one day whisper to me, that would call me over and over, there was the machine in my uncle's shoe store and there was Karen Granger and she was on my mind all the time and I somehow knew that I had to get her to put her feet in the machine."
October 14, 2009
I bought this book almost a year ago and I've read it off and on since then.
The prose is quite lovely, more prose-poems than anything else. But that's really the only thing going for this too-long book about an ultimately very shallow and empty man.
I actually really enjoyed the book at first. The first couple of pages even reminded me of my own writing (but much more refined) but after a while, the book's charm started to lose me, and I put it down for months at a time. I recently decided to just finish it so I would be done. It wasn't so bad that I just wanted to abandon it, but it wasn't so good that I had to see how it ended.
Essentially this is a book about a man who is searching for fulfillment, and tries to find it in his intimate moments with women. The memories are beautifully crafted, realistic, and sensual without being vulgar or crude (though, that may have been a nice change every once in while). But they are couched in a tale of a man caught in a marriage to an insane woman. She is a religious zealot, clinging to her dogma to help her overcome memories of incest. He is a sex-obsessed agnostic trying to find some permanent wholeness in this world. They have a son and pull him back and forth between their philosophies.
As the book wore on, I grew to dislike the narrator more and more, and felt more and more sympathy for his insane wife. (Though, I never grew to actually like her as a character.) I don't know if this has more to do with the book or where I find myself in my life at the end of the book. My life when I started this book was vastly unhappier than now when I've finished it, and so I wonder if—while I was sad and alone—I was more forgiving of the narrator.
I almost gave this book 3 stars based on the writing, but I decided that was just not enough. 2 stars it is.
The prose is quite lovely, more prose-poems than anything else. But that's really the only thing going for this too-long book about an ultimately very shallow and empty man.
I actually really enjoyed the book at first. The first couple of pages even reminded me of my own writing (but much more refined) but after a while, the book's charm started to lose me, and I put it down for months at a time. I recently decided to just finish it so I would be done. It wasn't so bad that I just wanted to abandon it, but it wasn't so good that I had to see how it ended.
Essentially this is a book about a man who is searching for fulfillment, and tries to find it in his intimate moments with women. The memories are beautifully crafted, realistic, and sensual without being vulgar or crude (though, that may have been a nice change every once in while). But they are couched in a tale of a man caught in a marriage to an insane woman. She is a religious zealot, clinging to her dogma to help her overcome memories of incest. He is a sex-obsessed agnostic trying to find some permanent wholeness in this world. They have a son and pull him back and forth between their philosophies.
As the book wore on, I grew to dislike the narrator more and more, and felt more and more sympathy for his insane wife. (Though, I never grew to actually like her as a character.) I don't know if this has more to do with the book or where I find myself in my life at the end of the book. My life when I started this book was vastly unhappier than now when I've finished it, and so I wonder if—while I was sad and alone—I was more forgiving of the narrator.
I almost gave this book 3 stars based on the writing, but I decided that was just not enough. 2 stars it is.
September 13, 2012
Usually I don't finish books if I dont'like them that much, but decided to make an exception for this. Since I've been hearing a lot about Robert Olen Butler for along time, I just wanted to be able to say I'd read something of his.
The book has no plot to speak of and isn't broken up into chapters. It jumps freely from the present to points in the past. I suppose that you could call it stream of consciousness, because it's reflections the protagonist has about women and sex(although it may be the least sexy erotic book I've ever read). In italics there are also passages ostensibly from the womens' points of view, which are I guess what he imagines them thinking.
The wife Fiona becomes more intensely religious and evidently has a mental breakdown. Meanwhile, Ira, the main character, is getting involved with a young Austrian woman he meets at work. He seems to conflate being devoutly religious with being crazy, though I suppose that she is crazy. In any case, he tells their young son that there secrets we keep from Mommy. I was really glad tob e done with this book, and in spite of the lyrical, sometimes lovely prose, can't recommend it.
Butler shares some things with Ira, such as service in Viet Nam. This doesn't mean that the book is autobiographical, but it could be.
The book has no plot to speak of and isn't broken up into chapters. It jumps freely from the present to points in the past. I suppose that you could call it stream of consciousness, because it's reflections the protagonist has about women and sex(although it may be the least sexy erotic book I've ever read). In italics there are also passages ostensibly from the womens' points of view, which are I guess what he imagines them thinking.
The wife Fiona becomes more intensely religious and evidently has a mental breakdown. Meanwhile, Ira, the main character, is getting involved with a young Austrian woman he meets at work. He seems to conflate being devoutly religious with being crazy, though I suppose that she is crazy. In any case, he tells their young son that there secrets we keep from Mommy. I was really glad tob e done with this book, and in spite of the lyrical, sometimes lovely prose, can't recommend it.
Butler shares some things with Ira, such as service in Viet Nam. This doesn't mean that the book is autobiographical, but it could be.
August 17, 2019
All the vaginas that Ira Holloway has ever kissed, caressed, entered or desired have always whispered to him, whether in America, Vietnam or Switzerland. But his wife's falls silent when she becomes a hysterical Roman Catholic to purge her shame about childhood sex with daddy. Of course Ira is really whispering to himself, in a comic and sweet ventriloquism. These vaginas lack the sass and irony of Eve Ensler's “Vagina Monologues,” where real vaginas speak for themselves through the voices of their owners and not their visitors. However, Butler has done a wonderful job of conveying how a man experiences them, and he also makes vivid the encounters with another culture, in particular Viet Nam, its vaginas included. 2005-1-12
October 5, 2011
I have absolutely no idea how I feel about this book or Butler's work in general. At times, his elongated prose is almost hypnotic and takes you with it and, at times, it's long-winded and self indulgent. Yeah, it was hot, really hot, but the overall tone was dark and awkward and was like taking a cold shower. There is no question that Butler is a talented writer, in fact, he's better than most authors working today, but he's never made me feel good about finishing one of his books. He's made me feel smarter, intrigued and involved, but never happy or relieved. So what should you glean from this review? Who knows, I guess it just is what it is.
November 25, 2012
This book sucked baseball bats. The writing is self-indulgent male-centered sexual fantasy in a very creepy way. Literary pornography. The women he wrote about might as well have been well-designed made-to-order blowup dolls. It was very depressing to read and to realize that men at their worst are programmed to think this way. Utterly narcissistic, misogynistic, and for those two reasons, repulsive. I read this many years ago for a book club and was so traumatized, I still can't rid myself of the bad aftertaste. Not erotic AT ALL. I was relieved to see that a few male reviewers only gave it one star too. Those reviewers must be halfway normal and relatable.
January 30, 2016
Well, I fought and battled to get through this one and I have to admit that I'm glad I did. I eventually adjusted to the run-on sentences, the massive paragraphs, and the lack of chaptering. I glossed over the titular whispers in the second half or so of the novel. They still seem more like a gimmick to me, like Butler was more concerned with being unique and standing out than writing a quality novel. That's disappointing, because he is a talented writer. Anyway, the ending is abrupt. Certain questions are left unanswered, but I guess that's always the case with women.
December 13, 2013
I'd say this would actually be 2.5 stars?
I found a lot of the imagery to be really detailed and cool, but pretty much all of the characters were vile enough to actually impede my ability to enjoy the book, and the following tended to make me feel very uncomfortable and creeped out:
-virtually everything the narrator thought
-virtually everything the narrator's wife said
-virtually everything the narrator believed his wife was thinking
It made the book a little difficult.
I found a lot of the imagery to be really detailed and cool, but pretty much all of the characters were vile enough to actually impede my ability to enjoy the book, and the following tended to make me feel very uncomfortable and creeped out:
-virtually everything the narrator thought
-virtually everything the narrator's wife said
-virtually everything the narrator believed his wife was thinking
It made the book a little difficult.
June 9, 2015
I could not get past even the early portion of this eerie, pseudo-erotic, memoir-like narrative from a Pulitzer winner. There seemed, to me, a distinct lack of recognition of beauty in intimacy in the author's writing; it seemed replaced instead with grotesque imagination and erotic, fetish-like fantasies of a disturbed mind. After much struggle, I handed it over to the charity used-books store attached to a local library, cautioning its storekeepers on the book's contents.
June 23, 2008
I got this book in a bag of books from a coworker some time back. Of course the cover intrigued me so I kept it to read instead of instantly putting it on half.com or paperbackswap.com. So I finally read it and wow what a strange book. Guess it was a little insight to some men's minds about how they view a woman's body.
April 15, 2012
I love anything by Robert Olen Butler but I found I could only read "They Whisper" in random bursts when I was in a certain mood. Not a one-sitting read. More a slow, bewildering wander through the confused mind of a grown man who remains at the mercy of adolescent-level hormones and the woman who gets to deal (or not) with it.
November 15, 2014
I thought this one was interesting by how deep it went, how much we were exploring a character's relation to other characters. It didn't seem to go very wide, but went a long way down. The structure and pacing is definitely a little nonlinear, but there's some interesting things here if you don't get too hung up on the unusual narrative movement.
April 23, 2008
This is a book about a man who truly loves and is obsessed with women. He narrates the twists and turns of his life, including a stint in Vietnam and a tragic marriage to a mentally ill woman, all through the filter of his obsession.
July 15, 2010
a good book i could only read in doses, but finished quickly. stream of conscience style, a young man's story of a difficult marriage via a highly sexual landscape filled with all the women he has loved.
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