Cooper Cruz reviews Fair Warning by Robert Olen Butler.
Expanded from an award-winning short story commissioned for Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope magazine, Fair Warning is part love story, part meditation on the possibility of love.
Set in the fast-moving, polished world of Manhattan auction houses, a world where everyone must own or be owned, the novel centers on Amy Dickerson, a 40-year-old art auctioneer beset by distractions. There are the demands of her job as the star of Nichols and Gray, an auction house catering to the fancies of the rich. There's her unsteadily married sister and widowed mother. And there are two unannounced suitors, whom she considers with the keen eye of a woman who assesses properties for a living.
Her character is at no time dull; by turns, she's passionate, independent, strong, insecure, a former model, discriminating with men and horny. She's a Texan who takes into account pheromones, both hers as well as those of clients, tests men coyly and examines the shirts she's kept of former lovers.
Amy's search for truth (and perhaps new shirts) finds her romantically entertained by the two men who call on her. Trevor Martin, a bidder with whom she becomes intrigued, is an unsettled boy of a man looking to clear out the unpleasant memories of his youth by selling the ornate antiques of his recently deceased mother. Alain Bouchard, a boss-to-be and majority shareholder in Nichols and Gray, has "a faint air of bullshit" and seduces her with his language.
The resolution is unexpectedly dramatic, stirring and fitting.
Butler delivers the story unobtrusively. You're never acutely aware that there's a man behind this first-person narrative. And his writing is clean, simple and intelligent. But all of this is to be expected of Butler. The author of 10 novels and two collections of stories, he's received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and a National Magazine Award in 2001 (both for fiction).
For more on Robert Olen Butler and his upcoming visit to Inkwood Books, see Freebie (p.31).
—Cooper Cruz
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2002.