Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After years of collecting early 20th-century postcards, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain) takes 15 choice missives as inspiration for his latest volume of short stories—an ambitious writing exercise that even in his assured hands yields mixed results. The stories range in tone and substance, from the humor of "The Ironworkers' Hayride," in which a man lusts for a sassy suffragette despite her wooden leg ("her mouth is a sweet painted butterfly"), to the melancholy of "Carl and I," about a woman who pines for her consumptive husband ("I breathe myself into my husband's life"). A few stories amount to little more than vignettes or reveries: in "No Chord of Music," a woman takes her husband's car for an empowering ride, and in "Sunday," an immigrant at Coney Island feels blessed to be in America. Other postcards trigger more fully realized stories. "Hurshel said he had the bible up by heart and was fixing to go preaching," reads the card Butler takes as his cue for "Up by Heart," a funny tale that addresses questions of faith and fundamentalism. "My dear gallie... am hugging my saddle horse. Best thing I have found in S.D. to hug," wrote a woman named Abba, inspiring Butler's poignant "Christmas 1910," which evokes the loneliness of a young woman homesteading on the Great Plains. Though many stories are as slight as the postcards themselves, the collection as a whole adds up to a thoughtful commentary on America at the dawn of a new century: while some Americans were buoyed by their confidence in technology and progress, others, at the mercy of a disease-ridden, hardscrabble existence, could trust only in their faith in God.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post

Several years ago, in a stimulating essay called "The Reanimators," Jonathan Dee complained about the increasingly common "practice of conscripting flesh-and-blood people into novels" -- books that are supposed to be, after all, products of imagination. Robert Olen Butler's new short story collection, Had a Good Time, is full of real-life characters, but they are so unfamous and imagined from such motes -- the brief messages they once wrote on the antique postcards the author likes to collect -- that it seems unlikely even Dee could raise an objection.

Detractors will call Butler's premise a gimmick, admirers a conceit; either way, the challenge to the writer is formidable. Of all forms of letter-writing, the picture postcard demands the least originality and detail from the person composing it. Indeed, Butler cheats a bit, several times using cards whose front-side images are not mass-produced shots of some tourist spot but particular photographs taken by the sender: The message in these cases can amount to a caption.

Even so, Butler is applying the bellows of invention to very tiny sparks. For example: "Well I got married to Milk Can and we are now on our honey moon. Mr. Watt is here and he looks stunning. Katie." Over the next 14 pages Milk Can will turn out to be -- whatever he may have been in real life -- a prosperous dairy farmer that Butler names Clarence Trimble; Watt will blaze up into a romantic Ashcan-School painter who tempts Katie to bolt from her new marriage.

Eight years ago, Butler published another high-concept collection called Tabloid Dreams, using zany downmarket headlines as the basis for some wildly imaginative extrapolations. The stories in Had a Good Time don't rise to the same bravura heights, but the results are a consistently entertaining display of this Pulitzer prizewinner's varied skills. The strongest recurring theme of the new book is premature death -- from disease, despair, accident. In "Carl and I," a distraught wife seeks to share the fate of her husband, dying of tuberculosis, via contact with his sputum-stained handkerchief: "I expose the remnants of his tortured breath and I lift it to my face. And I breathe in, deeply." The collection's first story, "Hotel Touraine," a kind of cross between Horatio Alger and John O'Hara, centers on a Boston bellboy who drops the chip on his shoulder about a monied guest only when a sudden decline in fortune makes the guest jump out of his eighth-floor room. Even "Sunday," whose postcard genesis is a happy picture of Coney Island swimmers, turns out to be anything but a day at the beach: Its 48-year-old protagonist, full of tender feelings toward his mother and wife, dies on the sand from a heart attack.

There is, to be sure, some comedy in the collection, including "Up by Heart," whose Tennessee miner-turned-preacher, Hurshel Hudgens, sees his new career come to a quick end after two visitations from the Stetson-wearing Lord. (The second encounter is sufficiently unpleasant that Hurshel kicks the deity in a sensitive spot.) Among the most charming pieces is "The Ironworkers' Hayride," in which Butler seems to rewrite a famous bit of Flannery O'Connor in the spirit of Booth Tarkington by having a shy company accountant work up the courage to touch the artificial limb of his pretty date -- only to be told, "Just for future reference, Milton. It's the other leg."

As was the case in Tabloid Dreams, all of these stories are told in the first person, but Butler rarely settles for impressing us with his range of vocal effects. He favors strong plots and strong twists. "Hiram the Desperado" would work well enough as the comic monologue of a lovesick schoolboy roughneck, but the author turns the piece into a sad version of Ring Lardner's famous "Haircut," in which readers will realize the awful truth of an incident that the narrator, their only source of information, has badly misapprehended. Butler's surprise endings can be tender -- a mother who manages to visit the trenches of the Western Front finds her son in less need of her affections than the shattered officer who goes to fetch him -- and they can be brutal: Rather than pass up the chance to enter America, one sister lets her beloved twin return home to Ireland, alone, to die of the trachoma that's been diagnosed on Ellis Island.

Not all the stories succeed. "The Grotto," for example, about a Southern woman's panicky but enlarging encounter with a local Egyptian guide, is mostly an E.M. Forster setup without a Forsterian follow-through. Also, in a handful of places, Butler's diction ("hunting buddy," "a structured, managed break") seems to time-travel forward from his circa-1910 settings. Still, the author more than satisfies us with the book's tonal variety and unexpected linkages. Halley's comet flies through it as a motif, and the Singer Building looms over more than one story as a totem of modernity -- though one doubts that Americans of 1910 were so often self-conscious about the "new century" they were living in.

Between stories, the author intersperses human-interest newspaper items, all of them culled from (or skillfully invented to sound like?) August 1910. There's occasionally a connection between the clippings and the stories, but more often than not one can't discern any. The news items confuse the issue here, but perhaps they signal Butler's warm-up for another collection whose concept will be as high as some of the pleasures afforded by this one.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (July 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802142044
• ISBN-13: 978-0802142047
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #805,324 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking Calculated Risks on Behalf of Literature, August 27, 2004

By	Bestbeast "Mr.666" (Key Biscayne) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (Hardcover)

Mr. Butler continues to experiment with new ways of looking at the world, at the people who enhabit his world. He doesn't write simply to give us the same old same old. He is taking chances on behalf of his craft. AND he's still very much in control of his powers. HAD A GOOD TIME, though not a perfect book, is another attempt by the author to keep going, to keep surprising himself with possibilities, to give his readers something different. For that and much more he gets my respect. I recommend people read and enjoy this new book regardless of what I or anyone else in these little snippets say. In my book, Mr. Butler is a brave writer for continuing to write from where it counts, where it is still vibrant and exciting. Writing from his intellect and heart. It's a winning combination.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Masterful Creative Technique, February 19, 2005

By	Jon Linden (Warren, N.J. United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (Hardcover)

In Butler's new book, he has created a new type of epistolary technique. He uses a news story and a postcard to introduce each of his stories. The concept of the postcard is further refined by showing the significant difference between life as it is, and life as depicted on the postcard.

First and foremost, the book is about America. Many of the characters are immigrants, coming to America for the first time. Many are not. But all meet the trials and tribulations of American life. And they write a postcard to someone they know and/or love. Yet that postcard is not in the least an accurate depiction of their life at that point in time.

Butler deals with the physical, the spiritual and the concepts of life and death in a visceral manner. Some of his stories are about war. Others are about immigration. Still others are about the contrast between life and death. These are the same questions that haunt all of our minds. And through his stories, Butler gives us a perspective on all these things, in fact, a very American perspective.

Butler is at his very best in the short story genre. He won his Pulitzer Prize for a terrific book of short stories. This one is no exception. It is highly recommended for all lovers of experimental modern literature, and those who love the short story genre, as these are some of his best.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Postcards from a muse., September 18, 2004

By	Peppy Jane (Beaufort, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (Hardcover)

Mr. Butler has been visited by a divine muse. How else can one explain his inspired idea of writing the stories behind the antique postcards he collects? "Carl and I" and "The Ironworkers Hayride" are quite possibly two of the finest short stories ever written. The author is a master of this format and his book is a must-read for aspiring writers and postcard collectors.