Accidental Blogger

I haven’t read the book – only seen a couple of reviews. As Sam Anderson says in the New York Books article, Intercourse, a collection of 50 stories by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler, is a well written gimmick.  But a fine gimmick no doubt, because public interest in the sex lives of others is insatiable. The author tries to capture in his imagination the solitary thoughts of famous couples while they were … well, copulating. The stories are not so much an account of physical intercourse or historic pillow talk, as "mental monologues" of the participants during sexual interludes. Given our knowledge of history and current affairs, the idea is at once funny and salacious. To cite a railroad analogy, the author attempts to map the life journeys of well known partners-in-passion through their individual streams of consciousness running on monorail tracks while their bodies coupled at required and prescribed physical junctions.

Robert Olen Butler’s new story collection, Intercourse, is, as its title suggests, totally about doing it. It imagines the thoughts of 50 iconic couples as they knock the proverbial boots, beginning with Adam and Eve copulating on “a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, a little east of Eden,” and ending with Santa Claus blowing off postholiday steam in January 2008 by doing the nasty with an 826-year-old elf in the back room of his workshop. But, as the clinical tone of Butler’s title also suggests, Intercourse is very much not a work of erotica. It tends to ignore messy fluids and crotch-logistics in favor of wordplay and psychological nuance. The book proceeds through twinned vignettes—complementary stream-of-consciousness prose-poems paired across facing pages, with the primal physical act implied in the margins between. (When you close the book, each of the couples gets pressed together.)

Besides Adam and Eve, the storied couples into whose heads Butler tries to take his readers are as disparate as Leda & Zeus of Greek mythology, Mary Magdalene (with a Roman centurion) of Biblical lore, Cleopatra & Mark Anthony of ancient history as well as modern day star crossed couples like Prince Charles & Princess Diana and Robert Kennedy & Marilyn Monroe. Among political couples currently in the news whose bedroom ruminations the author imagines are George W. and Laura Bush. Predictably the former thinks belligerent and ungrammatical thoughts while the latter safely dwells on bland home decorating notions. Yes, yes, Bill and Hillary are there too – circa 1971. While Bill may have heard Coltrane in his head while contemplating the young woman who would be his bride, Hillary, according to Butler was hearing a completely different musical refrain. 

The ballsiest vignette, the “oh, snap” moment that will make you hunch over protectively on the subway and possibly Google the basic legal definition of slander, is Butler’s depiction of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham as striving twentysomething law students: “this had to be done eventually,” Hillary thinks, and goes on to fantasize about sex on the floor of the Oval Office—“I don’t care if that’s the next time we do this, to be honest with myself, but I choose this time and I will choose some others in between because one day we’ll be fucking on the eagle and there’s a soft knock at the door and the secretary knows not to barge in and she says Madame President, the Soviet premier is on the phone.” Although it’s predictable— perhaps even because it’s predictable—the episode feels convincing, and even, in the dusk of our overheated never-ending primary, poignant. Hillary’s dispassionate scheming is right out of central casting, and recalls all the book’s other political lovers, from Eve to Cleopatra to Henry VIII. Butler seems to be telling us that repetition, above all, is the essence of humankind’s perpetual bump and grind. And, in a world in which all the secrets are out, perhaps the greatest art lies in making us blush anew at what we already know.