FICTION

BUTTERFLY STORIES by William T. Vollmann ; (Grove/Atlantic: $22; 200 pp.) Reading William Vollmann’s new novel is a little like going on one of those amusement park rides where you scream, clutch your loved one and swear never to do it again, but then as soon as the ride is over you jump on line to buy another ticket. The unnamed main character (called at various times, the butterfly boy, the journalist, the husband) travels with a friend, the photographer, to Thailand and Cambodia where, in an almost religious fervor, they have obsessive, unprotected sex with many, many prostitutes. The photographer seems purely decadent, but the journalist, who falls in love with Vanna, a Cambodian prostitute, is clearly looking for something. To say what that is--love, consciousness, identity--unfairly shrinks this sad and subtle novel. The journalist becomes a “ . . . crazed and greedy butterfly . . . The girls give him colds, coughs, sore throats, weird new aches. . . . What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality, blurring faces and names. . . .”

Vollmann’s writing has its own bright, lethal rhythm like a cut that pulses blood with every heartbeat. Instead of being gratuitous, the graphic sex and violence are completely organic to the story, which turns liquid and contradicts itself on a moment’s notice. Although it has great rewards, “Butterfly Stories” is a scary and difficult book.