Possessed By the Flesh

By John Skow

Writer Robert Olen Butler comes into this long, claustrophobic novel of erotic obsession with a powerful charge of literary momentum, including a Pulitzer Prize last year for a fine short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. He's still on his feet at the end of They Whisper (Holt; 333 pages; $22.50), but he's moving slowly, like a man who has just bushwhacked through 20 miles of tidal marsh and who needs a hot shower and breakfast. Guessing how this valiant effort will be received is chancy. Is a reader close enough to the hero's fleshy predicament to feel more involved than exasperated? Distant enough to remember that in matters of sex, all positions are ridiculous?

Ira Holloway is a man who loves women, adores their quiddities, luxuriates ceaselessly in their bodies: toes, earlobes, the whole array of earthly delights. When he is paying what would appear to be monomaniacal attention to one sweetheart, he is, naughty fellow, roistering in memory or anticipation with a flotilla of others. This isn't calculated, callous satyrism; Ira isn't Don Juan. He's helpless, a captive. (He does seem to have a job, but it's in public relations, and doesn't require much attention.)

This sounds like bedroom farce, but the hero doesn't see it that way. Ira narrates his own ensnarement as he pursues and marries a troubled beauty named Fiona, and his tone, between episodes of drooling, is one of earnest concern. Rightly so, because Fiona counterattacks with Ira's own weapon. She was abused as a girl by her father, and her psychological wounds require constant, repeated assurance that her husband (who lusts for all women) desires her. "Prove it," Fiona demands, often at moments when Ira lacks inspiration. She grows excessively religious and further benumbs Ira with frenzied, eye- rolling prayer. He, of course, resorts to his anthology of remembered affairs to get him through the nights.

There should be a good sexual joke here -- the tireless besieger besieged, sacked and pillaged -- but the author won't let matters play that way. He ) allows no distance at all from constant sexual striving, less pornography than pathology. Every page of every chapter is nose to skin, eyeball to sweaty flesh, told by Ira in long, gush-of-consciousness sentences that ooze on for several hundred words. Now and then the type switches to italic as the tormented Fiona, somewhat less convincingly, rants her anguish.

Whether this is effective is a matter of taste -- and endurance. Butler's earlier fiction, mostly about Americans in Vietnam and Vietnamese in the U.S., is tight and controlled (The Alleys of Eden and The Deuce are two of his novels). Here he deals obsessively with obsession, and in his frenzy forgets to let his readers up for air.