"The journalist" of Vollmann's Butterfly Stories is on assignment in Thailand, which mostly means spending every cent he has on prostitutes. Unlike his rakish companion "the photographer," the journalist is a real romantic, finding something in these women that feeds some need that lies deeper than sex, although they fulfill that need for him, too. He falls half in love with nearly all of them, until he falls fully in love on a trip deep into the jungles of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge have been lately on a killing spree. It's hard to say what makes this prostitute, Vanna, different from the others, except that she becomes a repository for these deep needs; her feelings toward him--as opposed to feelings toward the necklace he buys her or the money he gives--are inscrutable and ambivalent. But his feelings are strong enough that he marries her--despite having a wife back in the U.S.--or perhaps the marriage is in name only, a name given to the strength of those feelings. Naturally, when he's whisked out of Cambodia, he yearns for her, first in Thailand, then back in the United States, where he purposely wrecks his marriage out of jealousy and fear.
It's tempting to read Butterfly Stories as a companion book to Whores for Gloria, another book about a man deeply enmeshed with the local prostitutes. The protagonist of Whores for Gloria trawls San Francisco's Tenderloin District, not Southeast Asia, and though they can be irascible or even hostile, the prostitutes there have a kind of transparency that the journalist searches for in vain. In Gloria, the protagonist rarely even has sex, preferring to listen to the whores' stories, but the language and cultural barrier make it impossible to know if any of the Thai and Cambodian girls are telling the truth, or if they are, whether it gets lost somewhere in translation. Their opacity is at the heart of the book's tragedy; we know that the journalist will never find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for both depends and is stymied by the exotic nature of Vanna and the others. Even in the flesh, she's a dream and a fantasy, and it's for the fantasy that he wrecks his life, upending his marriage and ultimately even contracting AIDS.
It's hard to say where Butterfly Stories might fall in a ranking of Vollmann's works for me. It's more standoffish and at-arm's-length than Whores for Gloria, and perhaps less satisfying by design. It's frustrating read--the guy is such a loser, and I can imagine that someone who picks this one up as their first Vollmann might be put off by the exoticizing and fetishism on display, though I think one more attuned to his work will notice the instability of that quality, if not the critique of it. Most disturbing to me was recognizing a small detail--the journalist, unable to re-reach Vanna, travels to the Arctic and falls for an Inuit girl--that seemed so like The Rifles that I couldn't help but wonder how much of Vollmann really is in here. (That's something he does quite a bit, I think--puts himself in the story in ways that are ambiguous, mixing himself in indeterminate percentages.) There's a nobility to the guy in Whores for Gloria, but what the journalist evokes is more along the lines of pity--a much more discomforting emotion. But it must be said that Vollmann makes it look easy, and if Butterfly Stories does not stand out among his works, taken in isolation it must be astonishing.
