What to Do With the Rest of Your Life Awakening And Achieving Your Unspoken Dreams Book

The worst trash in print, the titles glimpsed on the pseudo-newspapers in the supermarket checkout lane, provided Robert Olen Butler with the dreams that are this story-sequence, a assortment of beautiful losers. A rare imagination's at work here, spinning a fresh crazy quilt from the weirdness in the big-font bold type, the stuff of JFK & Jackie O & Elvis, of reincarnation & impossibly gifted children. Not surprisingly, the stories that result are a dozen smushed cookies, tragedies w/ a sweet tooth, using screwball means to reveal heartache & defeat. The lone exception would be the closer, a case of transcendence, genuine though nutty, w/ a heroine who survives first the wreck of the Titanic & then the passage of the entire subsequent century. I'd say she closes the circle, that girl; she ushers all these freaks & anomalies back into the ocean of story. Butler finds fresh currents & leewards across that ocean, in TABLOID DREAMS, & while at the level of sentence he doesn't shake me as deeply as, say, a Barthelme, his foursquare American rhythms nonetheless prove impressively flexible, & I'm down in a slalam at his sense of timing, his ability to turn a story around a central phrase. This author won big (the Pulitzer, especially) for his previous collection, A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN. That book is indeed masterful, a great immigrant story-sequence, about the Vietnamese after 1975. But the fact that GOOD SCENT was told by someone American-born, rockribbed Midwestern, anticipates the freedom of idea & empathy found in these DREAMS, a fantasy-catalogue w/ the power to bruise even as it makes us chuckle. This one wears the medal on my library shelf, vivid proof that you needn't go farther than the corner store to start chasing some strange.