Manhattan was the perfect subject for Barthelme’s comic fiction, a source of always-shifting relationships.
Decades after his premature death-in 1989 at the age of 58-Donald Barthelme might be the one indisputably minor American short story writer of the last century who remains a pleasure to read and reread. He focused primarily on surreal, unpredictable short stories that were often good but rarely great. He experimented with form restlessly and surprisingly from one story to another but rarely created anything that hadn’t been seen before in the works of those writers he admired-Samuel Beckett, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Alain Robbe-Grillet and S.J. Perelman. He could amuse the heck out of readers but rarely made them laugh out loud. And he composed each story as if it were an idiosyncratic fling designed to please nobody but himself.
The Magnificent Jumble of Donald Barthelme’s Stories
At a time when American fiction was growing almost too ambitiously wild and unpredictable-with big, staggeringly imagined works coming from Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gass, and William Gaddis-Barthelme remained true to his smaller, more easily graspable absurdities. He was, in fact, about as wild and wacky as the sometimes unbearably sensible New Yorker ever got. Which is to say-not that wild and wacky at all.
As his biographer and former student Tracey Daugherty recalled, when Barthelme taught creative writing at the University of Houston in the 1980s, he gave his students the following assignment: