Driven by Commerce
Pulitzer-winning Robert Olen Butler’s latest is an intriguing character portrait devoid of deep or moving insights
by Julie Hale
Robert Olen Butler
Fair Warning (Atlantic, $24, 240 pp.)
Butler appears 6:30 p.m. Feb. 11at Davis-Kidd Booksellers
From the dark reaches of outer space to the teeming streets of Saigon, Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Robert Olen Butler has braved territory both real and imagined over the course of a dozen books and a 20-year career. The author who once described the writing process as an act of channeling has proven a first-rate conduit for his characters in books like the dazzlingly audacious Tabloid Dreams (1996), a group of first-person narratives inspired by dubious journalistic headlines—“Woman Struck by Car Turns Into Nymphomaniac,” “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot.” Far from being a freak show, the collection contained a wide range of uncannily authentic voices, all of which felt familiar. Symbolic and expansive, those voices rose above the specifics of story to offer something that—despite the implausible plot lines—was essentially human, urgently universal.
Butler, it seems, is at his best when engaged in such fearless experiments. Unfortunately, his latest book, Fair Warning—for the most part a conventional romance novel that’s neither as challenging nor as provocative as his previous work—finds him with both feet planted firmly on ordinary narrative ground. The voice here belongs to a glamorous, gavel-wielding auctioneer named Amy Dickerson, who presides over the podium of Nichols and Gray, a classy auction house in Manhattan. It will come as no surprise to readers that actress Sharon Stone provided the prototype for Amy; the idea was bestowed upon Butler by Francis Ford Coppola, who once saw Stone serve as an auctioneer and was so inspired by her efforts that he asked the author to construct a story around her performance.
Thus, the blond, Prada-clad, 40-year-old Amy. At auction, she whips the rich into buying frenzies, manipulates human desires with the ease of an Iago. She hails from Houston. Her sentences are spiked with Southernisms, and she has a Texan’s sense of entitlement. Amy’s work is the most intriguing part of the book—she’s turned auctioneering into an improvisational art, free-associating during sales with perfect poise and aplomb. The auction for her is an act of creation: “I am the maker of crucial connections,” she says. “Between the passion in a heart for an object outside it and the object itself. Between the self and its defining act of acquiring a certain thing of this world.” With her evaluative eye, she can’t stop cataloging objects, dissecting possessions, sizing up and classifying. Everything is more than what it actually is. The furniture in her Paris hotel room—an ensemble characterized by “marquetry and sinuous lines and cabriole legs and borders of laurel and acanthus leaves”—begs to be indexed. Whether she’s describing a simple Versace shirt or a vase given her by an old boyfriend, she presents each item with a specificity of detail, as though it were on the block.
Used to controlling her own desires as well as those of others, Amy is surprised to find herself thrown off-balance by the fabulously wealthy Alain Bouchard, a spruce, experienced Frenchman who plans to buy Nichols and Gray. His interest in the house’s premiere auctioneer, however, extends beyond business, and he soon makes Amy an offer that could change her life forever. Meanwhile, the past rears its ugly head. In Houston, Amy’s emotionally needy mother has decided to auction off the belongings of her late husband, a rancher, and she wants her daughter to supervise the sale. With this, the author sets up the plot machinery that will lead Amy to crucial realizations about both her self and Alain.
To Butler’s credit, there are no tidy endings here. But with its glitzy topic matter and moneyed cast of characters, Fair Warning sometimes has a smooth sheen of unreality. It lacks the broad scope that distinguishes the best narratives—stories that exceed their own boundaries, stretching to include us all. Fair Warning first appeared as a short story in Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine. It won the 2001 National Magazine Award for Fiction. In the form of a novel, though, it never completely makes the crucial move that characterizes Butler’s finest work—the shift from the specific to the mythic.
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