Dreamer

I recommended this book to my mother-in-law who devours a romance/mystery a day. I also recommended it to my wife who is finishing her thesis on questions concerning gender in scientific inquiry, something that borders on an exploration of epistemologies or how we actually KNOW something. My wife does not, like her mother, read fiction purely for the escape. How could one novel satisy both readers? Butler excites everything you've got that's still working. You'll want to chew on some of his prose--figuratively as well as literally. Some of his juices from the cook book have over-runneth their cup. You'll also want a well stocked bar on hand as you read this. Not to numb your gray matter after Butler's serious musings on intelligence and dreaming set it spinning, but just because his characters drink as well as they eat. And as for all your other parts...well, people are different, but Butler's writing makes my wife downright squirming-in-her-seat horny. When a white southern male writer can do that to a feminist....

Reading DREAMERS is like returning to the astonished pleasure you felt when you first started reading fiction: that here was your own secret world, that here were people you really wanted to know, here was a new universe of ideas. So much of contemporary fiction, with admirable skill, drags us through places and into the company of people--and through a dreary suite of used ideas--that we would, if we were there, immediately plan to get out of, as out of a place of death. We read such works, if we do, to justify to ourselves the less creditable aspects of our lives. Butler's Santa Fe, and his characters, and his ideas, are alive: they raise us above ourselves. When we put down the novel we feel that we have saved the airfare in going there and the social trouble and embarrassment getting to know the people, and the years of scholarship we'd need for such intellectual insight. They are the home we always wanted, but did not know it. The novel would be worth readi! ng alone for its brilliant theory of dreams, the first serious challenger to the basically Freudian theories that have framed psychological research and have dominated novelistic character development for nearly a century. If Butler is right about dreams, then a whole new kind of fiction will become possible. Among other things, the mainstream novel will become invigorated by the brash new energy of science fiction, while science fiction will acquire the depth and poetic richness of the best regular fiction. Add in the magic of the medieval dream vision and the shamanic fairytale, and the driving suspense and delicious paranoia of the contemporary mystery and the thriller, and the evocative language of a major poet, and you have DREAMERS.

In DREAMER a hermit tells clinical dream researcher Jody Nightwood that she should consult a shaman about dreams, because the encounter with completely alternative views about her field of study could shake up her way of thinking and provoke new insight. I think that is more or less what Jack Butler is trying to do with his readers. This is a novel of juxtapositions: of the mundane and ordinary with the occult and concealed. Nightwood believes her world is common enough, but even as she gains new insight into the complexity of her own life, she has no conception of the complex drama unfolding around her. This is a novel of many virtues. Butler is a master of evoking a sense of place. I have never been to Santa Fe (where the novel takes place) or even seen photographs of it, but from reading the novel I have an idea of what the city must look and feel like (it may be a wrong idea, but at least it is a very definite impression). The city and its locale became much more concrete for me than the other great novel that I have read about Santa Fe (DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP). And for all the fantastical elements in the book--CIA operatives, shamans, vivid dreams, vampires--he is at his very best at describing the most ordinary of events. Sitting at home making dinner, going out with friends to dinner, meetings with relatives, meeting new people: these were my favorite moments in the book. Anyone interested in contemporary fiction owes it to themselves to read this book. A marvelous read.

Dreamer is a psychedelic ski-jump of a book - a soaring, gliding, adrenalin-forcing, gut-slamming power ride. Definitely an E-ticket. It is an easy book to get into, as accessible as any serious novel I've ever read. It works on any number of levels, as a quickie spy vs. spy casual, as a parody of New Age manners and X Files-style paranoia, as a philosophical treatise. It is comic and sexy and densely allusive and electric - a charge throbs through the book. Butler makes his words play jazz, his language leaps and plays - though not in the ostentatious, gymnastic way employed by Tom Robbins or T. Coraghessan Boyle. Butler's sentences romp like puppies, they don't show off like acrobats. The cover blurbs don't do it justice - though the one from Larry Brown is nice: "Climb on (Butler's) back and fly him." Arkansans will appreciate Butler's name-checking of home folks - the architect Fay Jones is but the first to pop up - and he evokes the weird charm of Santa Fe ("the C! ity Different") with the bemused precision of a tippling surgeon. He isn't above making jokes that might strike some as Wayne's World level groaners - he names his sexy dream researcher protagonist Jody Nightwood (think about it) - for even these jokes work on more than one level. Butler has made a serious book that touches on the most profound metaphysical concerns - the epistemic limits of the human mind - and disguised it as a glossy beach read.If I were to play the influencing antecedent game, I think I'd pick the obvious one - Nabokov - and one that mightn't seem so obvious, Erica Jong. Butler reintroduces us to "John Shade," the Martian vampire from his 1989 novel Nightshade. Nabokov used "John Shade" as the name of the poet deconstructed by the deranged academic Kinbote in Pale Fire, and Butler directly alludes to Pale Fire (as a matter of concern for U.S. intelligence agencies) in Dreamer. One might also make something of the similarity between "Nightwood" and "Dark! bloom," the last name Nabokov gave to his female doppelgang! er Vivian in Lolita but this review hardly seems the place to go into that kind of Kinbotic exegesis.But I don't want to write about Dreamer; I want to keep reading it. But there's no more to read and so all that is left to do is tell you about it. And now I've guess I've done that so all I can do now is wait for the next Jack Butler book.

Review of Jack Butler's DREAMERSFor me, the most deeply pleasurable novels are possessed of what I call drag and draw. In a novel with draw, plot tangles and untangles, character blossoms and booms, and we are compelled to turn the pages, to read on. John Grisham succeeds again and again at draw.If, however, a novelist has drag, we find ourselves, as we advance through her book, dragged back to the preceding pages periodically to check the density of the weave and admire the texture of the sentences. As far as I can tell, John Grisham has no drag. Does anyone ever return to a sentence of his for the sheer pleasure of reading it again?Some writers have drag and draw. Charles Dickens is a master of the double art. Jack Butler is such another. Butler's fourth novel, DREAMERS, is richly embued with both qualities. What will become of Jody Nightwood as she advances farther and farther into her study of dreams and her romance with the mysteriou! s John Shade? If you are impressed by the way Stephen King uses dreams to inform action in the waking world of THE STAND, read DREAMERS. Jack Butler'll show you something really scary. Here there be spooky matters both governmental and vampiric. Read on. But know that DREAMERS will frequently drag you back with the sheer gorgeosity and yumyumyum of its sentences. Here's one: "And now the caravan crept even more slowly over one-lane wooden bridges under which ran the thready, superluminous clarity of the Holy Ghost broken on the world's dark rocks and between summer homes set back in pockets of the world's last green, sweet private prospects that somehow wore the look of coming abandon, as if they knew they were soon to be shut down and soon to lose the spirits that had given them habitation and soon to be forgotten in drifting snow." There's lots more where that came from. If you're looking for a flow with which to go, DREAMERS is a fine current! in which to swim. But be on the ready for rip tides.No! rman Mailer once complained of Truman Capote that he wrote the most beautiful sentences in America but had nothing to say. Jack Butler writes some of the most beautiful sentences in America these days. And he has tons to say.