It's pleasant to recall the groundswell of excitement caused among readers by the publication of Donald Barthelme's first short stories in the 60's. There just weren't then, as there aren't now, very many stories published that you wanted to call your friends up and read aloud from; and Barthelme gave us more than a few. His openings in particular came off with a special brilliance…. The style sparkled with intelligence; it was dry and clear. All in all, Barthelme's stories were a sort of literary prediction of the rise of Perrier-and-lime in the decade to come.

But the dryness was not a fetish; he could be, and he certainly is, on rereading, not just witty but extremely funny….

T. S. Eliot once remarked on the nearness of the modern poet's craft to that of the stand-up comic. Barthelme acts on the nearness. His prose has the little hidden pricks, the allusiveness (albeit the range of allusion is trashier, in places), and the almost constant self-parody of "Prufrock." But the will to please us, to make us sit up and laugh with surprise, is greater, of course. Indeed, it is greater than the will to disconcert. The chief thing to say about Barthelme, beyond praise for his skill, which seems to me supererogatory, is that he is fiercely committed to showing us a good time, at least in the vast proportion of his work. This accounts for a sense that grows upon us as we consider large quantities of Barthelme stories spread over time: the sense that, although there is avant-gardist flair, and broken lines and paragraphs, and an air of experiment everywhere in his prose, nothing much is finally challenged, no walls are even so much as asked politely to fall down. The spirit is: Many things are silly, especially about modern language, and there is much sadness everywhere, but all is roughly well. So let's try and enjoy ourselves, as intelligently as possible….

Barthelme arrived with a quirkily right sense of which disparate things, words, images could be made to lie down together; and this gift for collage, for verbal bricolage played nicely into the felt need for a literary equivalent of the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg, and the combinations of idea and image in Jasper Johns. Despite Barthelme's stated discomfort with comparisons of his work to pop art, the high-gloss surface of one of his three-pagers in The New Yorker circa 1970 does indeed keep company with the work of Roy Lichtenstein in particular. (p. 9)

Barthelme's whole way with the short story is to use it to give us lessons in dancing to sadness—just as Lichtenstein's paintings worked best when the comic-book instant was a painful one, thwarted love or a moment of doom. When Barthelme titled his fourth collection "Sadness," it was in eagerness to tip his hand. The sparkling surface bespoke a certain melancholy located elsewhere (one does not say "beneath the surface," because so much in the literary ideology of such writing militates against the idea that there is anything behind or beneath the linguistic surface).

But repeated suggestions of the greatly looming sadness off the edge of the page must finally frustrate us, and we come to want to know just where it hurts. The indirection in this big volume is mostly unrelieved; it lacks straight lines; and that is wearying. Weariness of pleasure was surely the risk inherent in publishing "Sixty Stories" by Barthelme at one blow. Because I had never read a Barthelme story that did not give me much, I welcomed the present volume with the attendant fear that the reading experience would be rather like trying to make a meal of after-dinner mints. But in fact it was like making a meal of appetizers (which, after all, is possible), because Barthelme invariably packs a suggestion, a tease of significance and substantiality into even his slenderest work. If nothing else, there is the note of sadness, but often there is more—hints of political seriousness, erotic actuality, blood, death, money; but all consistenly offstage, or at least having their center offstage, so that they impinge on the story, case a shadow on it, ruffle its surface just so much and no more. They do not exactly intrude; they are not exactly present. And if there is a Barthelme "problem," it is here, in the relation of his handsome little things to the big things they touch on.

My answer here must be evaluative rather than analytic. Donald Barthelme's best stories, by yards, are those in which the larger, weightier subject is treated with respect, not trifled with, not merely fleeced for the vestige of importance it can give to the essentially slight story. (pp. 9, 23)

In "Views of My Father Weeping" two stories are interwoven. In one a modestly realistic scene is replayed with variations in which the narrator observes his father sitting on the bed crying, for a reason the narrator does not know, and then performing a variety of equally mysterious acts. In the other, a somehow more fictive narrator, echoing 18th-century fiction in his style and range of reference, tracks down the "aristocrat" who ran over and killed his father in the streets. The more fictive story is more rational, less mysterious, but nonetheless more remote than the realistic. By virtue of the contrast, Barthelme succeeds in saying a number of things about some ancient art-life quarrels. But more than this, he authentically evokes the mystery haunting the father-son relationship, evokes it precisely because he does not summarize or seek to capture some banal truth about such relationships. In the same way, the woman Constanze in "The Abduction From the Seraglio" emerges through the cracks in the obtuse, jumpy, gorgeously stupid narration of her ex-lover. This story is in some ways a perfect consummation of Barthelme's work in that it has the same distinctly comic genius as some of the slicker, slighter pieces, but remains faithful to its subject, indeed to its sense of having a subject. It offers us, in other words, something besides Barthelme's own virtuosity to look at. Something similar might be said of the figure of Robert Kennedy in ["Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning"]. Kennedy seems to accumulate mimetically from a mélange of real and fictive data, fractured and mounted. At such times it is as if a master of character making, an E. M. Forster or a Balzac, had gone to school to Cubism.

But there is a good deal of bad Barthelme, though even the bad is likable; and what bad Barthelme does is trifle with great subjects. What needs most to be said about them, looking at "Sixty Stories" as a whole, is that this trend is ominously on the rise. Barthelme's development is more or less toward the lyric and trivial. Having observed this, it would be easy to say that Barthelme grows more indulgent and show-offish, but the truth is rather different, I think. The truth is that he is shifting his artistic focus from the true to the beautiful; instead of conjuring, in his fractured, collagiste way, the weirdness of the emotional life, he is seeking the unbroken arias of the imaginary. That he no doubt finds the latter easier than the former is beside the point (though it makes for a slicer and slicker prose). The point is that we are not finished needing, from marvelously gifted writers such as he, help with the vicissitudes of modern life. (p. 23)