Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Robert Olen - Jonathan Levi (review date 23 January 2000)

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Jonathan Levi (review date 23 January 2000)

SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. Review of Mr. Spaceman, by Robert Olen Butler. Los Angeles Times (23 January 2000): L1.

[In the following review, Levi criticizes Mr. Spaceman for the failure of its alien protagonist to examine cultures and societies outside of America.]

The good news for all you folks who read about Edna Bradshaw of Bovary, Alabama, in Robert Olen Butler's Tabloid Dreams is that she's back [in Mr. Spaceman]. The 1996 short story “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” in that collection was Edna's first-person account of her third-kind encounter with a spaceman. Back then, Edna was a fortysomething hairdresser living in a trailer park with her yellow cat, Eddie. One night, on her way back to her car in the parking lot of the local 24-hour Wal-Mart, she meets a spaceman.

“I am waiting for you, Edna,” he says, “because I study this planet and I hear...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Madison Smartt Bell (review date 23 February 1992)
   2. Richard Eder (review date 29 March 1992)
   3. Kathleen Gilgore (review date 4 September 1992)
   4. Cynthia McCown (review date 11 December 1993)
   5. Josephine Hart (review date 16 January 1994)
   6. Robert Olen Butler and Missouri Review (interview date February 1994)
   7. Julia Glass (review date 6 February 1994)
   8. Robert Olen Butler and Michael Sartisky (interview date spring 1994)
   9. Mark Ford (review date 12 May 1994)
   10. Helen Heritage August (review date August 1994)
   11. Lorrie Smith (essay date spring 1995)
   12. Jonathan Penner (review date 10 November 1996)
   13. Barbara C. Ewell (review date 17 May 1997)
   14. Susan Balée (review date summer 1997)
   15. Peter Stanford (review date 17 August 1997)
   16. Susie Linfield (review date 25 January 1998)
   17. Thomas Bonner (review date 20 June 1998)
   18. Ron Charles (review date 6 January 2000)
   19. Kit Reed (review date 16 January 2000)
   20. Jonathan Levi (review date 23 January 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

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