I recently read a great short story by Donald Barthelme, "Cortes and Montezuma", online, and it reminded me how much I had enjoyed his short stories when I first encountered them in my twenties. Looking to reacquaint myself with his work, I picked up this miscellany. There is some really good stuff in here, such as the title story; subtitled "A Yankee Way of Knowledge", it's a dead-on parody of Carlos Castaneda. I loved the subtle shifts in tone of "The Joker's Greatest Triumph" as well.

But a lot of the material in this book had been uncollected elsewhere, and it shows in parodies that are too obvious and little illustrated stories that reminded me of Spike Milligan's lesser work.

I still love Barthelme's fiction, and I'm going to hunt down a copy of one of the classic short story collections, like "Forty Stories", but this isn't the book I'd recommend to those starting out to discover his work. ( )

The consensus on Barthelme is that he launched the postmodern short-story form in the US. A very thoughtful review by James Wolcott ('Bookforum,' February / March 2008, pp. 9-10), sums it up very well:

'Today, I would hazard... the track marks of Barthelme's suave, subversive cunning are to be found less in postmod fiction -- although David Foster Wallace's dense foliage of footnotes suggests a Bathelmean undergrowth and George Saunders's arcade surrealism has a runaway-nephew quality -- than in the conscientiously oddball, studiedly offhand, hiply recherché, mock-anachronistic formalism of 'McSweeney's,' 'The Believer,' 'The Crier,' and related organs of articulate mumblecore.'

I would add three things:

1. The current generation of young MFA writing program candidates see the 'McSweeney's' option as one of their main goals. So in that sense, Barthelme is a ubiquitous influence.

2. Dave Hickey, the art critic, is a spiritual child of Barthelme's; and Hickey's kind of art criticism is increasingly influential. (I go into this in my pamphlet, 'What Happened to Art Criticism?')

3. George Saunders's essay on Barthelme, in 'The Brain-Dead Megaphone,' is the best thing written on Barthelme, if you're looking for a guide.

So it's indisputable that Barthelme is part of the history of postwar American writing. But is he someone to read now? Reading this collection, I was struck by just how much of it has lost its shine. There are hilarious pieces, and sometimes the wit is as sharp as it seemed in the 1970s. But Barthelme's liberal politics are really very predictable -- as easily predictable as his quips are surprising. And his absurdism has always been a safe version of real absurdism. If you're interested in surrealist or absurdist shock, read Raymond Roussel, or Daniil Kharms (who has been praised by George Saunders, in the 'New York Times Book Review.') As Wolcott points out, the entire New Fiction movement was subjected to a typically devastating critique by Gore Vidal ('American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction') in 1976; Vidal thought the movement, including Pynchon, was contrived and derivative of french experimental fiction. I'd rather trace it to Russian and central European absurdist literature and surrealism, but the significance is the same: Barthelme is watered-down, domesticated, playful, harmless absurdism. Never too angry, seldom directly polemic, never despairing. (That would be gauche, of course.) After a few days reading Barthelme, the happiness of seeing plodding seriousness exploded continuously and brilliantly right in my face when I least expected it but really not-so-secretly expected it all along pales, and I begin to wish for some real pain, and laughter that doesn't come with a little grimace of acknowledged artifice or complicity, or an unnatural heave. ( )