An amusingly quirky book, but I just couldn't quite gel with it.
Pulitzer Prize winner R.O. Butler tells the story of an extraterrestrial being arriving on Earth at the turn of the millennium, and he then proceeds to explore the powers of love and understanding, and what means to be human.
It's a mix of sweet absurdity, social criticism, and theological speculation, with very much of a restricted American setting : it seems aliens like the U.S. a lot...

>;-D

Some reviews from powells.com:

"It is a testament to Butler's gifts as a writer that he has fashioned from such cartoonish materials a novel of surprising poignance. Although the story is marred by silly, forced comparisons between the spaceman and the Messiah, it gains in resonance as it moves along, to emerge as one of Butler's most convincing performances yet: a work as amusingly quirky as his 1996 collection TABLOID DREAMS and as affecting, in its quixotic fashion, as his award-winning 1992 book A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN....In telling these people's stories Butler draws upon the same gifts of empathy and insight, the same ability to limn an entire life in a couple of pages, that he used to give his portraits of Vietnamese immigrants...such tenderness and power." New York Times, 03/10/2000* Michiko Kakutani

""MR. SPACEMAN is not exactly a satire, and some of its jokes have been done better in Vonnegut or in Halloween episodes of THE SIMPSONS. But it works because Butler has created a central character who is warm, memorable and fully drawn. Desi is the most likable, engaging and human of aliens." New York Times Book Review, 02/22/2000* Geoff Nicholson

""This is intransigent stuff for a serious novelist. With a narrator from outer space riding in on an old story, a writer with a literary reputation runs the risk of looking silly. The triumph is that Butler has brought his own lyric prose and quirky vision to a hoary premise and created a lovely and thoughtful tribute to the nature and power of the word. MR. SPACEMAN is intelligent, funny and enormously likable." Washington Post Book World, 01/16/2000* Kit Reed

""Butler has pulled off some neat tricks with MR. SPACEMAN. His mastery of character and humor make the whole an enjoyable read, even though the novel leaves one with an inevitable sense of loose ends and may seem, to some, to be just a lot of smoke and mirrors." Boston Book Review, January/February 2000* Chris Berdik

Synopses:
A humorous and touching novel about an alien being's arrival at the turn of the millennium is presented by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

An alien who wants only to understand the baffling human race abducts a series of earthlings and interviews them. In the course of his researches, he falls in love with a beautician named Edna who calls him Desi and moves into the spaceship with him. When Desi decides to break it to the people of earth that there is indeed life on other planets, he is stunned by the response: they want to make him into a god.

First Line:
I am. The word on the face of the bus is LUCK. Bright bulbs of gold illuminate the letters so that even though the night is dark, this word goes before them, shining.*

---

A comment...

Robert Olen Butler goes galactic with Mr. Spaceman
--by Susan Ellis, Weekly Wire, February 2000:

Desi’s got it bad.

Like most of our kind, Desi’s having difficulty working the appropriate words from his brain and through his mouth. But Desi, the narrator of Robert Olen Butler’s novel Mr. Spaceman, is not of our kind. His mouth is a lipless slit, and he’s got no ears. He is an alien.

And like most aliens who go scooting around in their spaceships violating our airspace, he’s on a mission. For a century now, he’s been skimming the planet, abducting its inhabitants so that he might record their words. On one such excursion, he met his wife, Edna Bradshaw, a kind-hearted trailer-dwelling hairdresser from Bovary, Alabama. On another he took up a cowboy who appeared in the first moving picture, and on another, he found a witness to the first manned flight.

This latest mission, though, has got Desi troubled. It’s a biggie, set up to coincide with the dawn of the Earth’s new millennium (not the one we just had but the one at the end of this year). He is playing host to 12, conveniently packaged in a bus named Luck headed from Texas to the casinos in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Among them are a punked-out girl, a Vietnamese refugee, an angry, well-educated black man, an elderly couple, and a former NASA employee. It’s a regular rainbow coalition, though, as Desi discovers, they are all very much alike.

The likeness is in the words, and it’s those words that have infected Desi, whose planet’s inhabitants are telepathic. Words are inadequate vessels for feelings, and Desi himself compensates by taking on advertising slogans and song titles. “Hi,” he says when Luck’s riders first board his spaceship. “My name is Desi. I am a friendly guy. There is a Kind of Hush All Over the World Tonight. I Would Like to Teach the World to Sing. I Would Like to Buy the World a Coke.” This approach works fine for a stop-gap measure, but it cannot stop the pathology of words — that words lead to yearning and yearning leads to dreams. And by studying humans, Desi must take on their words, and so takes on their yearning and their dreams.

But Mr. Spaceman isn’t all that heavy. In fact, it’s downright cute. Not cute in the sense of learning everything you need to know in kindergarten, or cute as in something Oprah might recommend, but cute as a Pulitzer Prize-winning (for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain) writer would have it. Desi is a friendly guy, adorably so, and his worldview as alien is sweet and pop culture-driven. There are jewels sprinkled about by Butler — little details and one-liners. The spaceship has a Hall of Objects, little items gathered from Earth such as a TV, a Pocket Fisherman, Soap-on-a-Rope, and Quacker, a Beanie Baby duck with its tag still attached. And when Desi is questioned by one of his guests from the bus as to how he, Desi, knows that his species alone has visited Earth, he replies, “Duh? I am a spaceman. I should know.”

Butler is guilty of a minor bit of pandering. First off, these space missions have a whiff of Xenophobia, as all of the abductees are American; you would think, given the law of averages, that someone from China would be snagged. Also, many of the Earthling’s observations, as recorded by Desi, seem too obviously geared toward providing some message about the reach of racism or the harm of religion without reason. Then there’s the fodder Butler has provided for many future English professors in his use of Desi as a God figure. In this last regard, however, the author is clearly fooling as it is much too much to be taken as a serious theme — his 12 guests drink Presbyterian Punch, a lime sherbet concoction just the color of Desi’s blood for goodness sakes.

Finally, there’s the ending, a happy one to be sure. It feels like a cop-out, though, given Butler’s expert build-up. But that’s okay, too. Readers are human and humans yearn.

This book --- Mr. SPACEMAN --- was posted to me, and arrived in Bologna (Italy) from Tempe (Arizona), possibly travelling as many miles as the extraterrestrial on his spaceship whilst on Earth.
The sender was a sweet lady, a retired civil servant, who saw my Wish List on Amazon.com and decided to make me happy: imagine my joy on receiving such a precious gift!
It was accompanied by a beautiful note, beginning with an epigraph pertinent to my profession as a Linguist:

LINGUISTICS BECOMES AN EVER EERIER AREA,
LIKE I FEEL LIKE I'M IN OZ,
JUST TRYING TO TELL IT LIKE IT WAS.
-Ogden Nash-

Grazie, Debbie!
>;-D

Released on Thursday, October 30, 2003 at Bookstall of Piazza Aldrovandi, dal libraio Berti. in Bologna, Emilia Romagna Italy.

I hope someone will enjoy this short book, a present from a dear lady in Tempe which I like to share with others as a memento of affection and love.