Mr. Spaceman

Rating:
Summary: Tons of science fiction heart
Review: Desi the Spaceman has quite a task before him. As he continues to hover over planet Earth with his wife Edna - he picked her up in the Walmart parking lot near her home in Alabama - he realizes that his mission is coming to its most dangerous step. He must reveal himself to Earth and face the possible defensive (and violent) response.

Before the "unveiling", which is to take place on New Year's Eve, Desi decides to hijack a bus of casino-bound gamblers from a dark highway. He's brought people to his ship before, but these will be the first who are allowed to retain the experience upon their release. The bus reveals a truly diverse bunch, everything from a punky, confused Christian to a gay bus driver named Hank.

Mr. Spaceman is a simple, affecting collection of the very things that Desi is trying to learn from each of the individuals. Their inner voices, emotions, fears, and - most importantly - their yearnings. While it sounds a lot like science fiction, it's really more of a gentle, New Age study of the human condition. Robert Olen Butler seems to have a great compassion (if not always the best understanding) for each of his characters as they reveal their stories to the spaceman. That sensitive tone carries through the novel without much plot development, but that seems about right. While there's nothing new here, it's an enjoyable read and I certainly look forward to other works by the author.

Rating:
Summary: Boom or Bust???
Review: Endless ramblings/obvious allegory/weak conclusion. This is not a humour piece nor sci-fi and has little value as a fiction piece for entertainment. Having said that, this novel has definite merit for school study. It is an exellent piece to provoke discussion and should be on a mandatory reading list for English and Psyc students.

I rate this as a 1 if your looking for a casual entertaining read. I suggest you keep away and stick with your blockbuster story writers.

I rate this as a 5 if you want a book for a reading club and are ready for potentially intense dialoque.

Rating:
Summary: Boom or Bust???
Review: Endless ramblings/obvious allegory/weak conclusion. This is not a humour piece nor sci-fi and has little value as a fiction piece for entertainment. Having said that, this novel has definite merit for school study. It is an exellent piece to provoke discussion and should be on a mandatory reading list for English and Psyc students.

I rate this as a 1 if your looking for a casual entertaining read. I suggest you keep away and stick with your blockbuster story writers.

I rate this as a 5 if you want a book for a reading club and are ready for potentially intense dialoque.

Rating:
Summary: Insight from an Outsider
Review: I bought Mr. Spaceman because of the novelty of the plot. It sounded quirky and fun and I hadn't read anything by the author despite the fact that I have seen his work in quite a few bookstores. I am very glad that I picked it up - this was a very honest look at American life at the turn of the millennium. Lives seen through the naive eyes of an outsider. Well concieved and written. And while lives and cultures are being examined, the author makes no value judgements; he leaves it to the reader to interpret.

Bottom line: great read.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully artistic, intelligent entertainment
Review: I loved this book. Desi is as engaging a "character" as I've encountered in years. He's been studying us for 30 years and is preparing for a grand appearance on New Year's Eve of the new millenium. His wise and quirky ruminations are by turn funny, poignant, and sad. He discerns the yearning that drives humans, but he doesn't quite understand it -- just as we don't. He has fallen in love with Edna, a downhome girl from Alabama who enjoys cooking and nurturing the folks who have been beamed up to the spacecraft.

So we wonder: Is this a love story? A sci-fi tale? A comedy? A study of the mysteries of language, of culture, of spirituality?

However we classify it (if we even need to do so), I'd like to say that this work seems a more imaginative achievement than his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book (A Good Scent ...). What impresses me most about Butler's writing is his commitment to voice. He lives within his characters, granting them compassion and understanding. His works are literary entertainments, what any discriminating reader yearns to find.

Rating:
Summary: No Ordinary Spaceman
Review: I met Robert Olen Butler in Portland, Oregon after having read and been impressed with They Whisper. I picked Mr. Spaceman up hoping for more of the same. Although I liked the portrayal of Desi, I found the premise for the story unoriginal and was disconcerted by the religious/Christian overtones, which were overplayed in my opinion. For better works, read They Whisper or Tabloid Dreams.

Rating:
Summary: No Ordinary Spaceman
Review: Mr. Spaceman had its genesis in one of the funniest and most poignant stories in Butler's last collection, Tabloid Dreams. In "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover," lonely Edna Bradshaw told of falling in love with Desi, an alien being, in the parking lot of an Alabama Wal-Mart. Now Butler has picked up Desi and Edna's story at a later point. Married and hovering above the earth at the end of the year 2000, they're entertaining an entire busload of Texans bound for a Louisiana casino. Desi has beamed both bus and passengers up to his spaceship so he can continue his research into the nature of human beings. This is to prepare him to reveal himself and his spaceship to earth media on New Year's Eve.

With down-home hospitality, Edna offers cheese straws and sausage balls to the abducted bus passengers who can't help noticing Desi's eight fingers on each hand, all ending in little sucker disks. But he's no ordinary spaceman; he's simple and wise by turns, lacing his conversation with earthly advertising slogans and song titles. "I'm a friendly guy," he says. "There Is a Kind of Hush All Over the World Tonight. I Would Like to Teach the World to Sing. I Would Like to Buy the World a Coke."

Eventually Desi learns the life stories of the individual passengers through his empathic powers. Though these often moving monologues from the heart compose a kind of cross-section of American humanity, many have the familiar ring of characters met too often in recent fiction. None is as engaging or original as Desi himself. His visit to an American supermarket, dressed in zoot suit and hat, is one of the most hilarious scenes in the book.

Butler's blend of humor and insight, along with his ability to examine the human condition, is on display here, as it was in Tabloid Dreams and Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Mr. Spaceman, though, is a tour de force, a flight of fancy which lands squarely in the center of the heart.

Rating:
Summary: What WAS this?
Review: Mr. Spaceman is a very entertaining read. There are true laugh-out-loud passages that demonstrate the author's ear for humor. In this book there are also some amazing sections where Desi channels his human abductees from the present and past and their voices are so real and clear that they come off the page and into the room with the reader. Unfortunately, these highly interesting characters are not active players in the plot. For that matter, neither is Desi. Most of the tension comes from Desi's own mind. He sits in his spaceship, observes, records, and wrings his eight-fingered hands over revealing himself to the people of Earth in his true form. There is a lot of tension built up and the ending may leave readers feeling short-changed. Also, the Christ-imagery, parallel, etc. is so obvious that the reader may feel as though the author overplayed this aspect of the narrative just in case the reader is not sharp enough to get it the first several times it rears its head. In spite of this, if you want entertainment and aren't expecting ephiphany or enlightenment, read Mr. Spaceman, and if nothing else about this book is a work of art, the dust jacket is beautiful in itself.

Rating:
Summary: A Brave Try
Review: Robert Olen Butler is an excellent writer, so one can almost understand his desire, first with "Tabloid Dreams" and now with "Mr. Spaceman" (an expansion of one of the stories in "Tabloid Dreams"), to escape the melancholic Vietnam memoirs he'd become known for.

"Mr. Spaceman" as a feature-length exposition goes a lot further toward redeeming his wanderlust than the dozen short stories in "Tabloid Dreams." At least here he takes the time to develop the rhythms of his characters, and to bring some "humanity" to his oddball cast and that, ironically, includes the forlorn but ultimately likable Spaceman himself, Desi. Through a series of interviews with his abductees, Desi (and the reader) learn of the lives, loves and fears of this busload of gamblers, and it is their stories, not Desi's, where Butler's humanity and compassion most reveal themselves.

But alas, the overriding premise is tough sledding. The nuggets of Butlerisms are cold comfort in a novel this obtuse, and ultimately one wishes Butler would choose to exercise his gifts in a format with less baggage.

Perhaps, having gotten it out of his system, next time he will.

Rating:
Summary: A book about language and character
Review: This is a wonderful work that extends from Butler's collection of short stories, _Tabloid Dreams_. Like in the short fiction, he uses the tabloid/sci-fi plot as a starting point for a work that really explores character over plot. In many ways it reminds me of Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_ without the hyper-political and and overly male point of view.

The alien Desi works as a wonderful device to get inside the heads of a real variety of characters; as we share and re-live their experiences, we get the full force of what they went through followed by interesting commentary and observations of the outsider Desi. Much of it is humorous and touching as we dip into the unique voices of all these characters. We see truck drivers, Harvard graduates, young teen rebels with piercings and everything in between. Butler's skill at presenting all these different types of people is astonishing.

An interesting critical point is the way in which Desi struggles with words themselves; Desi comes from a culture that has long since abandoned speech and the written word, and he is constantly questioning it's abilty to convey what we really mean. Despite this, Desi finds a real source of beauty in language and comes to unique undestandings about how we relate to one another.