Not-So-Great Days

DONALD BARTHELME WAS born and raised in Texas, and remains a shining example for all those unfortunates stricken with similar childhood calamities. At age 47, he is one of the most important writers in America today, published in both The New Yorker and in paperback--a rare, if dubious, achievement. Barthelme leads the so-called "comic irrealist" movement in modern fiction, which includes such lesser writers as Richard Brautigan and William Gass. But in his latest collection of short stories, Barthelme proves more adventurous than successful; stretched beyond its limits, his genre becomes tedious and inconsequential.

The book introduces seven formally related dialogues, conversations between distant and disembodied voices that lapse into parallel monologues and back again. None really work, although "The New Music," an allegory of lost innocence and hopes of renewal, comes closest. As Samuel Johnson pointed out, stories must be readable before anything else; Barthelme instead gives us ghosts chattering non sequitus. The great thing about the book is that you can flip six or seven pages and not even notice. Consider this passage from the opening of "The Crisis:"

--Yes. success is everything. Morally important as well as useful in a practical way.

--What have the rebels captured so far? One zoo, not our best zoo, and a cemetery. The rebels have entered the cages of the tamer animals and are playing with them, gently.

--Things can get better, and in my opinion will.

--Their Graves Registration procedures are scrupulous--accurate and fair.

The New Yorker has gotten more angry letters about Barthelme than any of its other writers; with this type of material, Barthelme is beginning to deserve them.

The more conventional stories tend to find their mark, but here too, the quality is uneven. In "Cortes and Montezuma," Barthelme demonstrates his mastery of a peculiar form that might be called transmogrification of legend, the same form he used in his novel Snow White and several short stories. He takes the fabeled meeting of Cortes and Montezuma and twists it, distorts it, makes it fresh. Among the stories, "Tales of the Swedish Army" relates a sudden meeting of the author and a unit of Swedish soldiers on maneuvers in lower Manhattan, an exercise of the imaginative virtuosity that has characterized Barthelme's style. And "The Abduction of the Seraglio," in the best of these stories, sparkles with Barthelme's wit and masterful stylistic control:

I was sitting in my brand-new Butler building surrounded by steel of high quality folded at ninety degree angles. The only thing prettier than ladies as an I-beam painted bright yellow. I told 'em I wanted a big door. A big door in front where a girl could hide her car if she wanted to evade the gaze of her husband the rat poison salesman. You ever been out with a ratpoison salesman? They are fine fellows with little red eyes.

He goes on to discuss "welded-steel four-thousand pound artichokes" and sings a chorus about "poppin" Darvon and mothballs" and "sleepin' on paper towels and drinkin' Sea & Ski."

Sadly, this sort of fine writing, which Barthelme once piled up in quantity in the vast golden junkyards that were his books, stands out all too starkly in Great Days. Barthelme has chosen to contract his appeal to a limited audience, and move toward obscurantism. The self-consciousness engendered by the huge welter of 20th-century literary criticism inhibits Barthelme, forces him to kill his prose with refinement. Where are the barbarians?

Barthelme clearly feels that there is nothing left to be done; his wistful reminiscences in "The New Music" or his older story. "At the Tolstoy Museum," bears this out. Barthelme yearns for a simpler day, when authors wrote epics instead of this artsy noodling. As he writes in "The Crisis," "Three rebellions ago, the air was fresher." One sometimes wonders why these people who think there is nothing left to write end up killing so many trees. But Barthelme cares about art; perhaps more than any other contemporary figure, he is trying. I am left with this mental picture: Barthelme, sitting in the prow of a sinking boat, the noble idiot frantically bailing.