SOURCE: Hart, Josephine. “Beyond His Wildest Fantasies.” Washington Post Book World 24, no. 3 (16 January 1994): 1, 12.

In the following review, Hart argues that They Whisper is a “meditation on the spiritual nature of sexuality” and praises the profound and disturbing aspects of the book.

In literature, as in life, there are tales of singular passion—Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Antoine-Francois Prevost's Manon Lescaut. And then there are others, which tell of a multitude of amatory encounters—Moliere's Dom Juan, Casanova's Memoires and Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami. Robert Olen Butler's They Whisper belongs to the latter category. It is a profound, disturbing and important book.

“The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit—beyond good and evil,” wrote Nietzsche. But Robert Olen Butler's hero, Ira Holloway, has an almost messianic dedication to sexuality as a good in itself. They...