The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 August 2005
by Robert Olen Butler
Story-telling talent can hook on to the smallest events, objects or details of life and produce the most elaborate of tales. A good writer doesn't really need much to get the mind going. This book is a collection of fifteen stories Robert Olen Butler wrote based upon antique (and used) postcards from his personal collection. The cards all date from the first two decades of the last century, and sport period images as well as small slices of story revealed in the text handwritten or scrawled there. Butler has taken these as jumping-off points for each of these short stories, in which he embellishes the character of the postcard, and its writer. We read of the personal thoughts of regular people in the opening years of the 20th century. There are dark events throughout, and undercurrents of sadness and tragedy. Most of the stories take this shadowy path. But, in that, is the humanity of Butler's writing. Butler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. This collection doesn't quite live up to the lyrical magic of that earlier work, but the stories remain inventive and emotionally rich. Butler has a very personal style and tone that is more honestly felt than in the work of many contemporary practitioners of the short story. Throughout the book, too, are newspaper excerpts from around the country, but all from a single day, August 7, 1910. The articles are quirky and help set the time of the book, and there is a pleasant, if dark, circular feeling one gets in the last story of the collection. Anne Lamott wrote a book called All New People, whose title reflected the thought that in a century, everyone on earth will be replaced by new people. These postcards were all written close to a century ago. The people are vanished. The stories Butler invents leave one with the sense of the passage of all that time.
Also by Butler: [A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain]