Short Story Wednesday: Robert Olen Butler

 

This week I read three stories from Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards by Robert Olen Butler. My husband purchased this book recently and read all the stories and liked the book very much. 

Butler collects postcards from the early 1900s and he used some of these postcards as the basis for the stories in this book. Thus all of the stories are set in that time period. 

Each story is preceded by an image of the front and back of the postcard, and the message on the postcard is reproduced. 

I read the first three stories. Each was written in first person narrative, and they all were between 10-20 pages in length. I enjoyed all of them. 

"Hotel Touraine" is about a bellboy working at the hotel, and his reaction to the very rich guests, in particular one very young man who is heir to millions. 

"Mother in the Trenches" is a bit different, based on a photo of a woman in the trenches with those words written at the bottom. The narrator of the story is a woman who has journeyed from the US to France to visit her son in the infantry. A very moving story.

"The Ironworkers' Hayride" is more humorous than the first two stories, and a bit longer. The narrator is an introverted young man who works as an accountant for the ironworks in Sunnyvale, California. Another man has asked him to take his sister-in-law on a hayride and he has told him that the sister-in-law has a wooden leg. I am not sure if the narrator is too shy or worried about the wooden leg, but he eventually gives in and escorts her on the hayride. This was Glen's favorite story in the book, although he liked them all. This story was made into a one-act opera with libretto by Robert Olen Butler. 

When I first read these stories I thought "Mother in the Trenches" was my favorite of the three. But in the days since I read them, parts of all three of them have returned to my mind often, so I guess I just like them all.

I have never read anything else by Robert Olen Butler, but I will be reading the remaining stories in this book and look for other short stories by him.