Donald Barthelme is the most important least read author of our time. He reinvented the short story as a medium, and wrote prose that was precise, elegant, wild, and absurd. He was a great satirist, of a rare, compassionate strain. His works were an integral part of the New Yorker during its heyday under William Shawn (but thoroughly unlike the suburban stories of Updike and Cheever that one thinks of as the typical New Yorker story.) Barthelme influenced contemporaries like Dave Eggers and George Saunders, among many others. But until recently, much of his work was out of print. He never sold as many books as his fellow "black humorists" Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. And though I find him to be one of the great writers of the last 50 years, and one of the great reading pleasures of my life, I have a difficult time recommending him to others. I really shouldn't.
One reason for that is the medium. Though he wrote four novels (Snow White, The Dead Father, Paradise, and The King) which are all quite wonderful in their own way, none of them is quite as compelling as his greatest short stories (though The Dead Father deserves a place on any bookshelf). Sadly, the short story has gone the way of the poem in the average literate person's diet. But if I am to recommend Barthelme, and that is what I want to do, this is where I must start.
The main places to begin are the anthologies 60 Stories and 40 Stories. The numbers sound more daunting than they are: 60 Stories clocks in at just over 450 pages, and 40 Stories is a mere 246 pages. Despite their brevity, these are multifaceted and sometimes complex stories. There is Me and Mrs. Mandible, about a thirty-five year old man's return to elementary school. "[W]e were studying common fractions. I could, of course, answer all the questions, or at least most of them (there are things I don't remember). But I prefer to sit in this too-small seat with the desktop cramping my thighs and examine the life around me." It's a silly conceit that Barthelme is able to use to create a story of real pathos and genuine resonance.
There are more formalist exercises like The Sentence, which is what it says, though it may be unfinished, as it lacks a period at the end. It is an extended sentence about the nature of sentence making, about the attempt at clarity and perfection that is, inevitably, doomed to fail.
the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and doesn't see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won't respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding, and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn't want to waste anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through the mind more or less
In a way, the humanity that lies at the heart of such abstractions is Barthelme's trademark. He was often an experimental writer, but even when he was stretching the nature of the short story in such works as Paraguay, Bone Bubbles, or The Glass Mountain, his works were often suffused with a deep compassion. His satires were often biting, but rarely cruel. Though (and this may say more about me than Don B.) one of my favorites, Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, which begins with the following casually tossed off lines:
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him.
And so it goes, a quotidian discussion about the arrangements for hanging their friend, who is part of the conversation:
We asked him what he would like played at the hanging... Colby said he'd always been fond of Ives' Fourth Symphony. Howard said this was a "delaying tactic" and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra would put us way over the music budget. "Be reasonable," he said to Colby. Colby said he'd try to think of something a little less exacting.
Barthelme often used other works of literature, art, or history as a springboard, as in Snow White, Eugene Grandiet, Bluebeard, and Engineer Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916. Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, is an abstract, fragmentary tale that captures the contradictions and significance of a historical figure and also manages to be tragically prescient about his death and his brother's tragic actions at Chappaquiddick.
So there's lots of reasons that I should be recommending Donald Barthelme to you. If there is much in his work that will baffle you or drive you crazy, there is enough serious delight to keep you interested, and a deep humanism that is rare in fiction. With that, one of my absolute favorite Barthelme stories, which is short enough to read on a bus ride, The King of Jazz.
Note: All of the links to stories in this post were taken from this page, which has permission to reprint these stories and is a treasure trove of Barthelmismo for Barthelmaniacs like myself.
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