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From postcards, a peek at human nature

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Special to The Times

When there is irony in a Robert Olen Butler story, and there very often is, it is irony of a now almost unfamiliar sort -- not the sly and smirky variety alleged to have died after Sept. 11, 2001, but its earnestly moral, O. Henryish antecedent. Thus in “Hotel Touraine,” the first tale in Butler’s latest collection of short stories, a tenement-dwelling bellhop near-bursting with class resentment focuses his rancor on a young, rich and apparently carefree hotel guest, who shortly proves himself unenviable by leaping out an eighth-floor window.

Each of the 15 stories in “Had a Good Time” is inspired by the images and writings on early 20th century picture postcards from Butler’s private collection, much as the stories in his “Tabloid Dreams” were based on real headlines from the supermarket rags. In the case of “Hotel Touraine,” the card bears a photo of the eponymous hotel with the words “This is where the people who have more money than brains put up” scrawled on the back in cursive.

Despite this somewhat self-conscious set-up, and the almost postmodern sprinkling of actual newspaper articles of the time between first-person fictional narratives, the prolific and much-honored Butler (Pulitzer and National Magazine awards, Guggenheim fellowship and NEA grant) is an old-school kind of writer. In interviews, Butler talks about the goal of literature being to get at such aged notions as “the deeply true and real human yearning that exists at the core of [each] character.” His ambitions are grand, in a modest and straightforward sort of way: to size up a time and a place, to build characters able to transport a reader there.

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In this case, Butler’s eye is on an earlier America on the brink, painfully aware of its own promise. The stories are all set between 1906 and 1917, in an America he paints as still largely innocent of its growing power but beginning to be equally seduced and terrified by glimpses of its rising industry, optimism and might.

To attempt to capture the mood of a nation in what amounts to 15 snapshots is a bold venture, and Butler can hardly be blamed if he is not always successful. The penny postcards, which are reproduced before each story, are so concise and startlingly candid that Butler’s attempts to work his way inside the minds of their authors often cannot compare to the cards’ own mysterious intimacies. In “The One in White,” for instance, a swaggering reporter recounts with a combination of bravado and self-disgust the 1914 invasion of the Mexican port city of Veracruz by U.S. Marines. But however complex Butler manages to render his hero’s colonialist chauvinism, nothing in his humbly realist literary toolbox allows him to match the hyperbolic creepiness of the accompanying card. On its front, a man in shirt-sleeves ambles past two bloody corpses lying on a city sidewalk. Someone has penned in an arrow to indicate a female figure standing in the distance. The back reads, “After the battle notice the pretty Senoritas in this photo. The one in white does my laundry.”

Other stories suffer similarly in proximity to their more arresting models, while others do not survive Butler’s forays into dialect (“That morning, she done give me some candy,” declares the old ex-slave narrator of “Uncle Andrew”). Even some of Butler’s best stories sag with detail, as if their narrators know they must explain themselves to ill-informed visitors from the future.

But the best stories are very good indeed. Take “The Ironworkers’ Hayride,” about a shy and lonely accountant who accompanies a wooden-legged woman on a hayride, and who is desperate to cop a feel but doesn’t want to seem “to play the masher.” It’s a sweet and funny little yarn, and feels very much of the era in which it’s set.

The anxiety that runs through the book comes out most powerfully in “This Is Earl Sandt.” The accompanying postcard depicts a blurry biplane in flight, and the penned writing on the back reads, “This is Earl Sandt of Erie Pa in his Aeroplane just before it fell.” In the story, a small-town banker takes his son to see an airplane fly, to “peek into the future and cheer it on.” But the plane crashes and its pilot dies, and in the wake of the accident, the otherwise staid narrator is paralyzed by a despair he can’t quite understand. He wants to believe in the shiny promise of modernity, “a world of business and banking, a world of making goods and buying and selling and building houses and factories and ... trains and bridges, and far off, a vast sea,” but he’s glimpsed the violence and uncertainty beneath it all. “What was it I believed? Did I sense a God all about me in the sky?” he asks himself. “Forgive me, no.”

God does show up in “Up by Heart,” in which Butler has a little fun. A Tennessee man named Hurshel memorizes the Bible to the last begat and sets out to become a preacher. He starts by washing the feet of the good old boys eating gherkins outside the general store. Soon God appears to Hurshel on a country road. He’s a genial chap in a white linen suit who says things like, “Goldurn betcha.” Hurshel is not sure of the old fellow’s intentions, having read enough Scripture to surmise that “the Lord my God is a savage God and he is a needy God,” which observation this last century bore out well enough.

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Ben Ehrenreich is a writer whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, the Village Voice and McSweeney’s.

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Had a Good Time

Stories From American Postcards

Robert Olen Butler

Grove Press: 268 pp., $23

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