Talking During Sex

Reviewed by Amos Lassen, 2008-08-09

Butler, Robert Olen. "Intercourse: Stories", Chronicle Books, 2008.

Talking During Sex

Amos Lassen

Robert Butler has written a collection of stories about what fifty couples talk about while having sex. He further identifies each pair of loves not only by name but by age and occupation as well. He puts them in a place having to do with their lives, gives them an occasion and a date and then lets them talk. He uses couples from all periods of time--Adam and Eve, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Shakespeare and the third Earl of Southampton, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, George and Laura Bush, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, the Prince and Princess of Wales and a host of others.
The dialog is hysterical even though most speak rather poetically and there is wonderful parody here when Butler is not too serious. I think my favorite line is when Gertrude Stein says of Alice B. Toklas, "her mustache is her mustache is her mustache".
The women here come across as vain and full of contempt; the men seem to think they are what they are not. I have read a review that considers the dialog between the sexual partners as insipid and not erotic and the whole concept of the book as childish and "asinine". I found it delightful, irreverent and fun.