To Infinity and Beyond

The good news for all you folks who read about Edna Bradshaw of Bovary, Ala., in Robert Olen Butler’s “Tabloid Dreams” is that she’s back. 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 you speak many words to your friends and to your subspecies companion and I detect some bright-colored aura around you and I want to meet you.” Being the kind of open and friendly woman that she is, it isn’t long before Edna has named the spaceman Desi (on account of his foreign accent) and not much longer before Desi takes her out for a cruise in his spaceship to “the spaceman’s version of the dead-end road to the rock quarry, where I kissed my first boy.” The Edna of “Tabloid Dreams,” however, turned down Desi’s bigger proposal. “I love you too, Desi. But I can’t leave the planet Earth. I can’t even leave Bovary.”

But four years and change later, Edna and Eddie have changed their minds and traded up to live with Desi aboard his spaceship. Butler the writer has made another kind of trade, handing the microphone to his lover from another planet. More than just a parking lot Lothario, Desi is an intelligent being who has spent 100 years studying the Earth. His mission is almost over. On New Year’s Eve 2001 (by Butler’s reckoning, the turn of the real Christian millennium) Desi will reveal himself to Earthlings.

In preparation, Desi has been collecting interviews with individuals: Edna, we learn, was hardly the first. But on Dec. 30, 2000, Desi has yet to write his own speech. As a final bit of research, he decides to beam up a busload of 12 casino-bound travelers as they cross from Texas to Louisiana in search of luck. Edna, all Southern hospitality, has made up name tags and pecan balls to make the new arrivals feel at home. But Desi is anxious to interview his guests.

These interviews give Butler a chance to tell the kind of first-person narratives we’ve come to expect from him. There is Hank, the gay bus driver; Citrus, who pierces her body in an effort to both escape and embrace her Holy Roller Coaster of a past; and Hudson Smith, a black attorney whose father “believed in the Melting Pot. . . . You could go into the Pot as a beer-truck driver in Alexandria, Louisiana, which is what he was, and through your children, you could come out a Harvard lawyer.”

What Desi is searching for is a voice without yearning, a single happy human he can hold up in front of humankind. This yearning, as Desi sees it, is the human infection, an endless yearning expressed through an endless stream of words. “The atmosphere of this planet brims with words; they blow past me and I quake in the turbulence.” As streams of words go, this cupful ain’t too bad. Yet more often than not, this is not the way Desi speaks, and therein lies the canker that gnaws at “Mr. Spaceman.”

With all of the 20th century languages to choose from, Butler has handed Desi a Lite cocktail of words whose source is the cliches and jingles of a late-American Wal-Mart Unabridged Dictionary. “We can hear all your words,” Desi explains. “But through the machines they are very confusing. And so, What is a Guy to Do? That is why we need to be Oh So Much Closer and then we can Get to Know You Better.”

Perhaps Butler wants Desi to be an inarticulate innocent, in the manner, say, of Jerzy Kosinski’s Chauncey Gardiner or Voltaire’s Candide, or John’s Jesus. Perhaps he wants this story of a latter-day Savior to act as a parable of sorts for latter-day Enquirers. One could imagine this type of design working brilliantly under the parti-colored imagination of Kurt Vonnegut. But Butler is no Kurt Vonnegut. In many ways his ear is more finely tuned to earthly timbres than Vonnegut’s, as he has displayed so well both in “Tabloid Dreams” and “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” his 15-story portrait of the legacy of the Vietnam War.

But Butler seems to want to squeeze two parables out of a single moonstone. On the one hand, Butler has Desi and his 12 worshipful casino-bound apostles eating a last supper of Edna’s famous Chicken Wiggle before Desi’s millennial descent to Earth. And on the other, Butler has an agenda that seems bent on communicating some particular message about the United States. His Earth, after all, is not very large. In all the years that Desi has spent collecting voices and specimens, he doesn’t once seem to have turned his attention beyond the USA.

We’ve certainly heard enough Second Coming jokes to last another millennium, and a Messiah with 16 fingers and 16 toes would get a comedian crucified in any club. But the problem with “Mr. Spaceman” is more than a lack of imagination. There is something fundamentally confusing about a parable that stretches toward universality while ignoring the part of the world that lacks a U.S. passport. One wonders whether Butler started slouching toward the mythic and, somewhere outside Damascus, Ark., got cold feet and tried to duck back into the convenience store he knows like the back of his five-fingered hand. It’s hard to look to the stars through the lights of a Wal-Mart.