The Blue Train
Author Timothy Butler—at age ninety—looks back some sixty years to write what he calls “a memoir of passion.” It is an odd memoir: no wives, no kids, no dogs. Just affairs. But about those he tells quite a lot. Most of the women must be in their seventies and eighties now, but not here. Here, they are as fresh and green as they were back in the day. As fresh as twenty-five-year-old Vee, when she touches the narrator in a certain way at a law school party in the sixties and sets this whole business in motion. “The switches, it turns out, were being thrown, all down the line. So the Blue Train could come through.” So passion could come through, magically changing everything, for good and ill, forever. “As we threw ourselves onto that train.” The author, a Wall Street lawyer before he turned storyteller, has previously written a nonfiction best seller, a novel, and several other books. He wrote most of the stories in The Blue Train in 2004, when he was seventy-three and others in 2024 when he would turn ninety. James Salter, the great fiction stylist and a friend of the author, read the 2007 version and said, “This is wonderful. You’re a terrific writer. The voice has terrific authority . . . not mediated. Very direct. You are the Satchel Paige of serious writers.” As you may know, Satchel Paige was a star pitcher in the old Negro League, before integration. He then pitched in the Majors in his fifties.