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Overview
This may be the sexiest book you've ever read. It is also, at turns, among the funniest and the most harrowing and the most moving and the most lyrically beautiful of books. And it is also a book of uncompromising artistic integrity. They Whisper is an astonishingly rare thing in this sex-conscious age: a serious-work of literary art that directly and unflinchingly addresses the subject of modern heterosexuality. Butler's narrator is Ira Holloway, who as he moves into middle age is driven to examine his sexuality and its profound hold on him. Ira is, in many respects, an ordinary man: son of a steelworker, he is a husband and father; a Vietnam Vet, he works now as public relations man. But the details of Ira's quotidian life are of little real importance in his story. He lives - as so many men do - in an ongoing internal landscape populated by all the many women he has loved. And continues to love - instinctively, comprehensively, creatively, deeply. So deeply, in fact, that as he relives the moments of intimacy with them, Ira often speaks in the voices of these women. This weaving of the inner voices of both a man and the women he's loved creates a narrative driven by intuition and sensuality and free of theories and cant intellectualizing. The result is a compelling, profound, and timely examination of human sexuality and, not incidentally, one of the most rapturously erotic books of our time.Ira is trying to come to terms with his life. To do so, he must examine his sexuality and its profound hold on him. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Known for the psychological acuity of his six previous novels and for the short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain , for which he won the Pulitzer last year, Butler here moves into new territory. This is a literary novel about the physical chemistry of sensual love, told in lyrical prose via a sensitive narrator who venerates the memories of the many women with whom he has coupled, and who ``hears'' the whispers of their voices, which are interwoven into the text. At 35, Ira Holloway is a man who lives intensely through his senses; the slightest visual or olfactory stimulation releases sensual memories, which he recollects in a highly charged stream of consciousness. Holloway's sexual experiences go back to his youth in Wabash, Ill., his service in Vietnam, his affairs in Zurich and in New York, where he currently works in public relations. But Holloway is not a conventional, and thereby contemptible, womanizer; he is a man whose eroticism is coupled with a true appreciation of female sexuality and respect for women as individuals. More than a mere litany of sexual unions, the novel is, au fond , the record of Holloway's tormented marriage to a woman in the grip of a religious obsession that accelerates from eccentric to insane, and the anguished decisions he makes for the sake of their son. While the descriptions of erotic love are integral to the plot, the highly charged sensuality, the details of the rising stages of lust and the relentless stream-of-consciousness monologue sometimes grow wearisome. Some may empathize with Holloway when he confesses: ``I can become a little overwhelmed by the vast chorus that sings all around me, all the women, their throats throbbing in an Ode to Joy.'' 75,000 first printing; author tour. (Jan.)Library Journal
Butler has already published six novels to subdued response, but his first collection of stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain ( LJ 5/1/92), won the Pultizer Prize. This new novel details the rich, erotic life of Ira Holloway, an ordinary 40-year-old guy.Digby Diehl
An intensely sexual, emotionally powerful story of a love affair gone crazy.—Playboy
Josephine Hart
A profound, disturbing, and important book…Nothing less than a meditation on the spiritual nature of sexuality.—The Washington Post Book World
From Barnes & Noble
From the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain comes this novel about Ira Holloway, whose memories and thoughts of women in his life--from childhood moments & his time in Vietnam, to his present life & what might be--fall between dreams & reality.Book Details
Published
March 30, 1995
Publisher
Penguin USA
Pages
352
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780140243932