From Publishers Weekly
After years of collecting early 20th-century postcards, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Butler (
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain) takes 15 choice missives as inspiration for his latest volume of short stories—an ambitious writing exercise that even in his assured hands yields mixed results. The stories range in tone and substance, from the humor of "The Ironworkers' Hayride," in which a man lusts for a sassy suffragette despite her wooden leg ("her mouth is a sweet painted butterfly"), to the melancholy of "Carl and I," about a woman who pines for her consumptive husband ("I breathe myself into my husband's life"). A few stories amount to little more than vignettes or reveries: in "No Chord of Music," a woman takes her husband's car for an empowering ride, and in "Sunday," an immigrant at Coney Island feels blessed to be in America. Other postcards trigger more fully realized stories. "Hurshel said he had the bible up by heart and was fixing to go preaching," reads the card Butler takes as his cue for "Up by Heart," a funny tale that addresses questions of faith and fundamentalism. "My dear gallie... am hugging my saddle horse. Best thing I have found in S.D. to hug," wrote a woman named Abba, inspiring Butler's poignant "Christmas 1910," which evokes the loneliness of a young woman homesteading on the Great Plains. Though many stories are as slight as the postcards themselves, the collection as a whole adds up to a thoughtful commentary on America at the dawn of a new century: while some Americans were buoyed by their confidence in technology and progress, others, at the mercy of a disease-ridden, hardscrabble existence, could trust only in their faith in God.
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From Booklist
Butler is a supremely versatile and questing fiction writer, and his 13 books run the gamut from zestful social satire to romance to profound contemplations of war. He is also an ardent collector of early-twentieth-century American picture postcards, 15 of which, all neatly reproduced, inspired the 15 gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories gathered here in a book destined to enrapture a broad readership. Butler also frames his marvelously diverse tales with bizarre little items from newspapers published on August 7, 1910, a year, as his stories reveal, notable for the appearance of Halley's comet and its overall transitiveness. Horses and buggies are still being used as people grow giddy over the first automobiles. Airplanes are novel and precarious. The Great War brews, suffragettes are active, and class distinctions blur. Death is a frequent visitor in these remarkably lucid, affecting, and unpredictable stories, but plucky women rule, from a spirited gal with a wooden leg to a radical Mexican laundress to a horse-loving South Dakotan to a mother who goes to the front to comfort her soldier son. Butler also conjures up tongue-tied yet adoring suitors, husbands, and fathers; an 87-year-old man who was born into slavery; a boy with a crush on a teacher; and a man who memorizes the Bible. Scintillating, soulful, and surprising, Butler's virtuoso stories are deeply satisfying.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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