9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Something Else Entirely, May 8, 2001
Death has not prevented Raymond Carver from publishing new stories, but it has certainly slowed him down. Before the Carver story-mine peters out, try this gifted member of the Barthelme writing family.
Carver once wrote that Barthelme was something else entirely, a good call back in 1983. Academics in my country (Australia) appear to have overlooked Frederick in favour of his trendy, but less interesting, brother Donald. The Law of Averages sets the record straight. The only black mark against this volume is its failure to list original publication details for stories, a number of which appeared in the killer 1980s collections, Moon Deluxe and Chroma.
The Author's Note frankly discusses the development of his trademark style, not the least of which is the whippy story-titles. Frederick admits an urge to escape Donald's pervasive influence, hence the drive to write about "ordinary people in plain circumstances". Most commendable is his unabashed hero-worship of Veronica Geng, the astute New Yorker editor who changed his career. Most surprising is that he was a founding member of Red Crayola, the cult 1960s band.
A trivial reading of Carver is that he feasted on desperate people. Similarly, it misses the point to say that Barthelme covets mundane situations. At the least, he does an extraordinary take on the here and now of urban America, especially the speech and manners of its humid gulf country.
"I've always loved setting, the physicality of place," the author remarks, "I adore the dance, the daily tango, the scarce movements we make toward and away from each other ... These characters love the world as hard as they can."
In the earlier stories, the setting and choreography almost seem to coalesce into exercises of pure style.
Whether lurking at a mall, motel, restaurant, or apartment, Barthelme likes to chase a special cinematic light that will throw his characters into sharp relief. To unlock the essential gestures that will clinch the story, he often takes as his topic the continual misprisions between men and women.
The man may be digging a useless hole or pointlessly railing at the world. He might be put to work feinting with domestic stage props - the roast chickens, drinks and barbecue implements. He could end up in tears of pure confusion, or smiling at the living sculpture of a lover returned.
Richard Ford likes to give his female characters the best lines, but Barthelme is an unfeigned lover of women. His are as sexy and prescient as any in American fiction. Their "rich, complicated" eyes are caught doing the "tiny box-step" which precedes a sudden proprietary gaze. Part fashion buff and part anatomist, Barthelme dresses his prey meticulously and hunts down every frisson.
Without giving up on humanity, the mature Barthelme stories crank up a deadlier intent. He goes for the concentrated delights of the five-page riff. He bathes the stories in light of more menacing hues. The motels become "desolate, frighteningly utilitarian" or "a little less inviting in daylight".
Travel and Leisure takes a twilight-zone tour through a tumbleweed town harbouring pet ducks, performing snakes and memories of mayhem. The Autobiography of Riva Jay revisits American cinema's recurrent theme of edgy pubescence meets mortal risk. Harmonic is a collision of Barthelme's car-crash fetish and his scholarly interest in gambling. A chiaroscuro, Elroy Nights, rounds off the collection. In keeping with The Law of Averages, this is 50% comedy of manners and 50% the lottery of death.
The narrator of Elroy Nights comments on our struggle with the "manufacture of the self", a valuable preoccupation in the Barthelme stories. His characters are dogged experimentalists of language and gesture, striving against the odds to improve their acts, keeping the bits that work and discarding embarrassing failures. In this way, the stories acquire empathy and effect that could never be achieved if they were just stylised set-pieces managed from the director's chair.
Frederick Barthelme is the rare American writer who came good in the 1980s and got better during the 1990s. His stories have moved into new areas and his novels have upped the ante.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Splendid stories about ordinary people--, May 7, 2002
So many books are filled with lousy, hothouse prose, so many are overwritten or underwritten, or have no ideas other than the ideas you might hear on any newscast on MSNBC. Even books that get a lot of press seem sort of mundane and off-the-rack when compared with Barthelme's. He sees the world we live in from an odd angle, seems to like the really plain stuff that's always going on around us, and in his hands it tends to take on a magical glow. How he does it I don't quite know. Maybe it's just good writing, maybe it's the particular ideas that he elects to write about, maybe it's finding the slightly miraculous in the utterly ordinary. Anyway, it's a pleasure to read stories that have a different slant. I like the story where the meat slides down the counter, and the one where they go to the Home Depot, and the one where the girl writes her number on his arm, and the one where the big strange guy gets to drive the car. I like the crazy story about the runaway girl in the back and the story called Ed Works in which almost nothing happens. These characters have a realness about them that so much fiction misses--the people are just going though their lives and stuff is happening to them and they're reacting and sometimes it gets out of hand or there's a big moment that's really lovely and they don't miss the moment, but they don't make a religion out of it either. And best of all, these stories don't preach. That's rare these days.
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