At 50 Donald Barthelme has established himself as a remarkable—and remarkably influential—writer with a seemingly boundless capacity for invention. This representative collection of 60 stories [Sixty Stories] provides a welcome overview of his work to date, including an excerpt from the novel The Dead Father and five stories not previously available in book form. It also gives ample evidence that contemporary writing and art can be most frustrating at the very points at which they succeed most brilliantly.

More than one critic has called Barthelme's stories “parables”—presumably because the works are short, perplexing and suggestive, verging (one might suppose) on some larger realm of significance. But, as one soon realizes, these opaque little fictions are markedly different from the parables of Jesus or even Kafka. One feels, in fact, that they are the sort of thing a poststructuralist like Derrida would produce if he set out to write parables.

Ever ironic, sophisticated, perverse, fantastic and often extremely witty, Barthelme's stories seldom focus on character, plot or other features of traditional narrative. Instead, they seem determined to explore the range of interesting “misreadings” to be derived from intentionally eccentric ways of perusing and rearranging the artifacts—the “texts”—of the modern world. In so doing they envision other, impossible worlds; and they improvise endless permutations of the structures discernible in actual language and everyday perception.

Stories of this kind defy capsule description. It must suffice to note that some of them display as “found objects” certain moments of history, whether actual or invented (e.g., “Cortes and Montezuma,” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning”). Most of them bring to mind aspects of the current “scene,” as in the wonderful account of Hokie Mokie the jazz king. A number play with material borrowed from politics, philosophy, metaphysics and religion. What, he wonders, are angels to do now that God is gone? What if a benign capitalist bought Galveston, Texas? And occasionally Barthelme goes in for genuine satire, the sharpest of which is directed at such things as pop psychoanalysis, commercialized existentialism, religious pieties of all sorts, modern marriage (and divorce), and other banalities of our culture, high and low.

Obviously, then, the world of ordinary experience and thought is related to the worlds of this fiction. But—unlike many of their absurdist and surrealist analogues—Barthelme's fictions are so constructed as to illumine, in the end, very little of that actual human experience or of real human possibility. Indeed, they reflect nothing so much as Barthelme's love of purely linguistic effects. And in this respect the stories in this volume are not parables (or stories) at all.

Yet it is also in just this respect that these pieces remind one of a great deal of contemporary art, including the nonverbal (to which many of Barthelme's stories allude). For it is plain that much of our “high” culture regards everything except the medium itself with disinterest and/or irony, with the result that—as Barthelme himself hints in “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel”—even the ironist's medium is purged of most of what can greatly amuse or engage.

It is fascinating, then, to watch Barthelme and others attempt to make more and more out of less and less. The greater their success, the closer they come to an already visible limit. Just once, as Barthelme is creating so much out of so little, one wants to quote for him the words of a nameless character in his story “Grandmother's House”: “Having seen all this I then realized what I had not realized before, what had escaped my notice these many years, that not only is less more but that more is more too” (his italics). But of course—ironically—he knows that already, while possibly forgetting that less can also be less.