Dreamer : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Unique adventure plumbing line between dream and reality
Review: Aiming for the readership that missed out on one of the century's great literary classics, LIVING IN LITTLE ROCK WITH MISS LITTLE ROCK, versatile Jack Butler (fictioneer par excellence, poet, master chef) craftily puts together a page-turner that explores fascinating ideas about the meaning and purpose of dreams while spinning a spy thriller that defies description. If somebody came even close to unlocking the secret of dreams -- as Dr. Jody Nightwood does -- wouldn't the American government itself be out to stalk her? This gripping exploration of dreams and the fascinating group of people -- heroes, heroines, villains -- who are caught in that dreamworld kept me awake and dreamless for the nights it took me to finish it. And when I was finally able to dream again, I dreamt my way into the novel! Even readers who don't care for spy-versus-spy shenanigans will be tantalized by Butler's delicious descriptions of food, sex, and scenery. The menus of this book are mouth-watering, the scenes of lovemaking are original and charged with eroticism, and the travelogue of Santa Fe and its environs will make every reader want to pack up and move there at once. If you can't do that, pack up and move into this novel for a few nights, and see what happens to your dreams.

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Summary: Dreamers is the strange home you always wanted
Review: Don't listen to some pseudo intellectual reviews for this book. If you like mystery, like from Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell or Tamy Hoag etc. then this is a great read.If you can imagine a mixture of Tom Robbins and Dean Koontz, that is pretty close. If you like Santa Fe or the SW to boot - read it!! Bernd Phoenix

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Summary: Make you hungry. Make you horny. Make you think.
Review: I recommended this book to my mother-in-law who devours a romance/mystery a day. I also recommended it to my wife who is finishing her thesis on questions concerning gender in scientific inquiry, something that borders on an exploration of epistemologies or how we actually KNOW something. My wife does not, like her mother, read fiction purely for the escape. How could one novel satisy both readers? Butler excites everything you've got that's still working. You'll want to chew on some of his prose--figuratively as well as literally. Some of his juices from the cook book have over-runneth their cup. You'll also want a well stocked bar on hand as you read this. Not to numb your gray matter after Butler's serious musings on intelligence and dreaming set it spinning, but just because his characters drink as well as they eat. And as for all your other parts...well, people are different, but Butler's writing makes my wife downright squirming-in-her-seat horny. When a white southern male writer can do that to a feminist....

Rating:
Summary: A marvelous shocking of the imagination
Review: In DREAMER a hermit tells clinical dream researcher Jody Nightwood that she should consult a shaman about dreams, because the encounter with completely alternative views about her field of study could shake up her way of thinking and provoke new insight. I think that is more or less what Jack Butler is trying to do with his readers. This is a novel of juxtapositions: of the mundane and ordinary with the occult and concealed. Nightwood believes her world is common enough, but even as she gains new insight into the complexity of her own life, she has no conception of the complex drama unfolding around her.

This is a novel of many virtues. Butler is a master of evoking a sense of place. I have never been to Santa Fe (where the novel takes place) or even seen photographs of it, but from reading the novel I have an idea of what the city must look and feel like (it may be a wrong idea, but at least it is a very definite impression). The city and its locale became much more concrete for me than the other great novel that I have read about Santa Fe (DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP). And for all the fantastical elements in the book--CIA operatives, shamans, vivid dreams, vampires--he is at his very best at describing the most ordinary of events. Sitting at home making dinner, going out with friends to dinner, meetings with relatives, meeting new people: these were my favorite moments in the book.

Anyone interested in contemporary fiction owes it to themselves to read this book. A marvelous read.

Rating:
Summary: DREAMER is a delight of literary synesthesia
Review: Jack Butler is one of the sovereign poets of the English language and one of its greatest fiction writers as well. His last novel, LIVING IN LITTLE ROCK WITH MISS LITTLE ROCK (1993), was one of the landmark novels of the 20th century, breaking new ground in fictional technique. DREAMER is a more accessible book in the way that Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy novels are more accessible than McCarthy's first five works, two of which are among the greatest novels ever written. In DREAMER Butler reminds us that characters such as John Shade and Benjamin George, last seen in NIGHTSHADE, are very much alive and kicking way back here in the late 20th century, and that his talent for conveying stupifying dream sequences to the reader is even greater than before. As usual, he makes us feel sorry for some of the villains toward the end of the book (the deaths of the gay CIA operatives, Leonard and Toynbee, are almost unbearable in their cathartic beauty), and his heroine is not only sexy and brilliant but fragile in her sensuous quest for understanding. "What is it with you white people," asks the shaman in DREAMER; "I'm not asking you to BELIEVE in anything, I'm asking you to DO something!" To think deeply about the implications of this statement could change one's life. Add to this Butler's wonderful satire of such garbage as Language Poetry and the pretentions of California airheads newly moved to Santa Fe and the stage is set for a delicious, mind-altering read. The title is DREAMER, not "Dreamers." It's a delight of literary synesthesia. Grab it and fly forever, feel forever, forgive forever.

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Summary: Butler Captivates Audience with Newest Novel
Review: Review of Jack Butler's DREAMERS

For me, the most deeply pleasurable novels are possessed of what I call drag and draw.

In a novel with draw, plot tangles and untangles, character blossoms and booms, and we are compelled to turn the pages, to read on. John Grisham succeeds again and again at draw.

If, however, a novelist has drag, we find ourselves, as we advance through her book, dragged back to the preceding pages periodically to check the density of the weave and admire the texture of the sentences. As far as I can tell, John Grisham has no drag. Does anyone ever return to a sentence of his for the sheer pleasure of reading it again?

Some writers have drag and draw. Charles Dickens is a master of the double art. Jack Butler is such another. Butler's fourth novel, DREAMERS, is richly embued with both qualities. What will become of Jody Nightwood as she advances farther and farther into her study of dreams and her romance with the mysteriou! s John Shade? If you are impressed by the way Stephen King uses dreams to inform action in the waking world of THE STAND, read DREAMERS. Jack Butler'll show you something really scary. Here there be spooky matters both governmental and vampiric. Read on. But know that DREAMERS will frequently drag you back with the sheer gorgeosity and yumyumyum of its sentences. Here's one: "And now the caravan crept even more slowly over one-lane wooden bridges under which ran the thready, superluminous clarity of the Holy Ghost broken on the world's dark rocks and between summer homes set back in pockets of the world's last green, sweet private prospects that somehow wore the look of coming abandon, as if they knew they were soon to be shut down and soon to lose the spirits that had given them habitation and soon to be forgotten in drifting snow." There's lots more where that came from. If you're looking for a flow with which to go, DREAMERS is a fine current! in which to swim. But be on the ready for rip tides.

No! rman Mailer once complained of Truman Capote that he wrote the most beautiful sentences in America but had nothing to say. Jack Butler writes some of the most beautiful sentences in America these days. And he has tons to say.

Rating:
Summary: Spiral into the world of your dreams
Review: The first half of this book is spent describing the boring life of the main character, Jody Whatever the hell her last name is.

The story never leads anywhere. It simply revolves around this woman who's life is no more interesting than that of a paper weight.

I had to quit reading it halfway through because it was so silly and never lead up to anything.

Throughout the book, the writer kept yanking new characters and embedding them into the story without giving the reader who they were and where the hell they came from. A waste of time.

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Summary: Outstanding Thriller Novel
Review: The only reason readers may miss this novel, is that they may not be looking for author Jack Butler (pulitzer prize nominated) in this thriller/mystery category. But,if you are a die hard Dean Koontz fan, as I am, you are sure to enjoy this thriller quasi-paranormal spy novel set in Santa Fe, NM. I was totally blown away by the originality of the plot, characters and setting!

It has everything a summer novel should have: mystery, sincere characters, an adventuresome plot, and outstanding imagery. A definate page turner! Anyone even remotely familiar with Santa Fe, NM will easily identify and enyoy the familiar scenery that the action takes place in. Readers not familiar with Santa Fe will easily be able to grasp a mental picture of the flavorful surrondings and hunger for a visit to this high desert playground!

Butler's genius and mastery of the craft of writing shines brightly to make this one of the truly outstanding novels in its category. The novel is not only a "good read" it is intelligent and mind expanding. I must admit that DREAMER got into my dreams more than once while reading it!