SOURCE: Glass, Julia. “Robert Olen Butler Depicts a Man in Search of Women and the Truth.” Chicago Tribune Books (6 February 1994): 3, 11.

In the following review, Glass criticizes They Whisper for having a narrative and narrator that “seem ultimately adrift” and for Butler's sense of humor that disappears as the novel progresses.

Robert Olen Butler's ambitious, risky new novel is the rhapsodically uninhibited memoir of Ira Holloway, a 35-year-old man obsessed by the sexual encounters of his past. Proclaiming his compulsion “to tell the truth about my life in this body of mine, and I have to tell it in the ways that it really happens, through my senses,” he sets out to confront just about every symbolic nuance of sexual intimacy between men and women: sex as the most authentic knowledge of the hidden self; sex as a foretaste of death, as rebirth, as transubstantiation; sex as a struggle...