Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Robert Olen - Julia Glass (review date 6 February 1994)

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Julia Glass (review date 6 February 1994)

SOURCE: Glass, Julia. “Robert Olen Butler Depicts a Man in Search of Women and the Truth.” Chicago Tribune Books (6 February 1994): 3, 11.

[In the following review, Glass criticizes They Whisper for having a narrative and narrator that “seem ultimately adrift” and for Butler's sense of humor that disappears as the novel progresses.]

Robert Olen Butler's ambitious, risky new novel is the rhapsodically uninhibited memoir of Ira Holloway, a 35-year-old man obsessed by the sexual encounters of his past. Proclaiming his compulsion “to tell the truth about my life in this body of mine, and I have to tell it in the ways that it really happens, through my senses,” he sets out to confront just about every symbolic nuance of sexual intimacy between men and women: sex as the most authentic knowledge of the hidden self; sex as a foretaste of death, as rebirth, as transubstantiation; sex as...

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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