[In the following review, Ewell commends Butler's portrayal of unusual characters and absurd circumstances in Tabloid Dreams.]

We depend on writers to show us the unreality of our lives. If they do their job right, they remind us how we always seem to be missing what is important in our efforts to be human. But when we live in a world as bizarre as contemporary America, with its hysterical machines and ironic facades, then the writer's work becomes a bit tricky. How do you expose unreality in a world devoted to counterfeit and substitution? How can you tell which is which? Robert Olen Butler is one writer who seems to thrive on the challenge.

In his first collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, Butler sharpened the sense of strangeness by focussing on exiles. Part of what makes the stories in that volume so compelling (apart from the recognition that Butler is just a white boy from Illinois), is that the exiles are mostly Vietnamese, often women, and that they live in south Louisiana, a part of the country whose peculiarity is pretty much certified by the Cajun twists it applies to what passes for normal in the southern United States. In Tabloid Dreams, his second collection of short stories, Butler achieves a similar angle of difference simply by going to the grocery stores and buying the perspectives of the tabloids much as we all eventually do, standing in line to exercise our habits of ridiculous consumption.

The premise—or at least the writerly trick—of these stories is an exploration of tabloid headlines as though they were true. This is a wonderful gimmick, really—and the fact that Butler is working with HBO to produce a television series based on these stories indicates just how clever the ploy is. But what makes these tales more than hilarious devices is how much truth Butler makes the incredible captions reveal about being human, and how well they expose the strangeness of our own daily life.

One of the best stories, “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover,” illustrates the kind of depth that Butler can elicit from such an apparently silly supposition. Edna Bradshaw, a 40-year-old insomniac and divorcee, finds great comfort when the “regular old Wal-Mart” of Bovary, Alabama, becomes a 24-hour Super Center. It gives her a place to go in the wee hours when her loneliness gets the best of her.

One night in the parking lot she encounters a little spaceman, whom she calls Desi—because it's the right name for someone we like even though they talk “with a funny accent.” He has been waiting for her, he says, because Edna always tells the truth: “You seem always to say what is inside your head without any attempt to alter it.” Edna is won by Desi's gentle courtship, something in short supply in Bovary (and not entirely approved by Desi's fellow planetary researchers), and she adjusts admirably to all the little shocks of his difference—his “eight-sucker hands” and big eyes, his telepathic ability and smaller-than-expected spaceship—“not as big as all of Wal-Mart certainly, maybe just the pharmacy and housewares departments put together.”

If Desi helps Edna to “see things in the larger perspective,” Edna's willingness to love a spaceman reminds us how our usual notions of what is “pretty and sweet” may need “some serious adjustments” if we hope to overcome our loneliness. That the primary antidote for such loneliness is 24-hour shopping—or loving cats (“subspecies companions”) and spacemen instead of our tyrannical daddies or fellow Bovarians—is exactly the “kind of odd thing that makes you shake your head about the way life is lived on planet Earth.”

Much of Butler's humor derives from the blunt naivete of his narrators. Like Edna, they seem not to censor themselves in commenting on their lives; and, like the tabloids themselves, they willingly tell all, revealing absurdity and shallowness but also a great deal of suffering. In Butler's Tabloid Dreams, unloved or betrayed women become deadly—bashing thick-headed men with meteorites or setting themselves on fire at baking contests they have lost like their lives. Wives and husbands learn the bitter truth about their philandering partners by becoming glass eyes or suicidal parrots; young boys revenge their absent fathers by becoming efficient hit men or their mother's lovers.

One of Butler's gifts is his obvious sympathy for these absurd people, blundering toward love and stumbling onto truths they don’t quite recognize. Like the stiffly proper narrator of “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,” whose icy death transforms him into water and who ends up inside a waterbed on which lovers thrash about (after experience as clouds and rain and rivers and lakes and tea and—you know), these are “solitary travellers[s].” They only become “fully conscious” after they are dead. But they do at least see something. And so do we. By showing us how really strange things could be, Butler's stories give us new ways to look at our experience. And if his fiction makes us probe a little more deeply into the absurd dreams we all inhabit, then he's only doing his job—very well.