The second half of Donald Barthelme's canon, accomplished in the fourteen years following publication of The Dead Father, sounds a different note in the tonality of his short fiction. The stories are more relaxed and more generously entertaining, with as many comic effects as the earlier pieces but now with the humor not at the expense of an older tradition but drawn from the properties of Barthelme's own style. No longer will Kafka or Tolstoy be asked to sit uncomfortably within the outrageously inappropriate confines of our postmodern world; instead, the author's confidence with that world will let him joke with it on its own terms. Nor will there be a cubist disorder of conversations at birthday parties or cinema vérité pieces that steadfastly refuse to cohere. There will be precious few fragments, for now Barthelme has more trust in his ability to comprehend an overall situation—and most of all trust that his readers will not make more of them than he intends, the fear of which had kept his earlier short stories so defiantly anti-illusionistic.

With Amateurs (1976) the feeling is most immediately one of comfort, both of Barthelme in his role of writer and the readers in their roles as consumers of his stories. The opening piece, “Our Work and Why We Do It,” refers to Barthelme's frequently expressed opinion that he could be quite happy back in his previous job of assembling, composing, and laying out the contents of a magazine as its managing editor. The narrator is supervising a press, up to his elbows in “problems of makeready, registration, showthrough, and feed” (A, p. 4). But just as these unfamiliar terms have easy, functional meanings (once learned), so too are there equally mechanical solutions. No endless debates between Kierkegaard and Schlegel, no hapless protagonists pondering their existential fates—just the artistic pleasure of putting machines to work at producing the most wonderful things:

The tiny matchbook-cover press is readied, the packing applied, the “Le Foie de Veau” form locked into place. We all stand around a small table watching the matchbook press at work. It is exactly like a toy steam engine. Everyone is very fond of it, although we also have a press big as a destroyer escort—that one has a crew of thirty-five, its own galley, its own sick bay, its own band. We print the currency of Colombia, and the Acts of the Apostles, and the laws of the land, and the fingerprints.

(A, p. 5)

Within this happy context, Barthelme is able to play at language and idea with all the verve of his earlier fiction. The situation prompts a simile, and one simile prompts another, which is all it takes to turn loose his talents of linguistic invention. True, presses are run by a crew, just like navy ships—so why not add the other things navy ships have? As for what they print, the items seem extravagantly odd and random—except that all four exist in this world as printed objects and therefore have to be printed somewhere. Because these workers are pressmen and not writers, they are under no obligation to make the subjects cohere. They just print them, and are therefore granted a rare pleasure of play and association—the same pleasures Barthelme gives his reader in this narrative.

Within this story that typifies Amateurs are most of Barthelme's familiar techniques. Skinny lists of terms, here the names of typefaces, run down the page in one of the author's favorite forms, the litany. Other texts literally crash through the windows, bringing the same excitement as do the salesmen, rushing through the doors with new orders. The one element missing is that of graphic collage. But the press functions and typeface features take that role, and the story's busy tone is reminiscent of Barthelme's collage story from Sadness, “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace.” In that piece, however, the narrator had been driven nearly to exhaustion by having to come up with marvel after new marvel to delight audiences. Here there is no such worry, because the work is invigorating, rewarding, and unlikely to dissipate in either exhaustion or obsolescence. “Our reputation for excellence is unexcelled, in every part of the world,” Barthelme's narrator concludes. “And will be maintained until the destruction of our art by some other art which is just as good but which, I am happy to say, has not yet been invented” (A, p. 9).

Such is the condition in which Donald Barthelme finds his own work as the 1970s end. After a decade and a half of innovation, perforce disruptive because of the modernist traditions and conventions that stood in his way, and after the equally taxing struggle to establish his own post-modern mastery of the novel, he could—much like this story's pressman—settle more comfortably into a style of fiction writing that he knew would remain the standard of both excellence and currency for some time. Although the heyday of innovative fiction's spectacular accomplishments was over, it was now established as the mainstream—sufficiently mainstream for it to be attacked as Barthelme and his generation had challenged fiction a decade and a half before. And for the time being these challenges had been met. The attempts of John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978) and Gerald Graff's Literature against Itself (1979) to roll back standards to those of moralism and modernism had been resisted, and the next style of fiction, the Minimalism espoused by Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and younger brother Frederick Barthelme, had emerged by drawing as much on innovative fiction's imaginative freedom as on realism's figuration. The answer had been play: not the cocky, disruptive, irreverent play that subverted modernism in Come Back, Dr. Caligari, but a more harmlessly engaging style of amusement that takes the givens of both moralism and realism and good naturedly stands them on their heads.

In Amateurs Barthelme finds occasion for such overturnings in “The School,” whose life-or-death issue is the 100 percent mortality rate suffered by the pets and projects of a grade school class (starting with its tree plantings, continuing with its gerbil, and reaching the apex of anxiety with the demise of its sponsored third-world orphan), and in “Porcupines at the University,” an earlier story passed over several times before but now updated and added to the canon as a way of showing how the most unlikely and mutually alien subjects can be melded into a coherent story if all are treated strictly in character with the tools of literary realism (the situation involves a herd of porcupines being driven by porcupine wranglers across a college campus beleaguered by its own problems of disruption and dissent). In Great Days (1979) Barthelme shifts from subject and theme to structure and formal technique, yet keeps the same ideals of comedy and play in mind by focusing on the performative—a stylistic equivalent of the activities represented in Amateurs (class projects expiring, porcupines being wrangled, presses being run). Together, these collections reveal a confidence with subject and form equal to almost any previous high point in the development of the American short story.

Not surprisingly, this emphasis on performance coincides with the use of that most performative of American art forms, jazz, as a topic for several stories collected in Great Days. After “The Crisis” has begun the volume with a cautiously restrained examination of texture and surface and “The Apology” has moved more obviously into a jazz idiom by showing how an overwilling apologizer can drive away an offended suitor with a rifflike assemblage of overstated regrets, Barthelme offers a piece whose title tells the reader just what these words are meant to create: “The New Music,” in which standards of musical composition enhance the systematics of linguistics that the author has used before to expand the dimensions of narrative.

In both music and speech, rhythms are carriers of meaning. Rhythmic dialogues make statements far beyond the content of conceptual exchange; consider how the structure of something as simple as “Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing” says so much that it becomes the title of a humorous commentary on childhood's disaffections. In Barthelme's “The New Music,” the entire story is constituted of just such a disconnected dialogue, a mode he introduces here and continues in several other pieces as the collection's most distinguishing form. Canonically, it is the style of talk Julie and Emma exchanged in The Dead Father as a way of generating a new linguistic reality far beyond the constraints of both the father's and son's self-serving forms. Now in Great Days story after story can be produced by its creative possibilities, with a confidence detached from narrative explanations and contextual justifications. What the characters do in “The New Music” is rarely directed toward a goal or even an object, but rather expresses its own sense of activity:

—What did you do today?

—Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.

—Ah well. I was talking to a girl, talking to her mother actually but the daughter was very much present, on the street. The daughter was absolutely someone you'd like to take to bed and hug and kiss, if you weren't too old. If she weren't too young. She was a wonderful-looking young woman and she was looking at me quite seductively, very seductively, smoldering a bit, and I was thinking quite well of myself, very well indeed, thinking myself quite the—Until I realized she was just practicing.

(GD, pp. 21-22)

The most frequent words in this passage, like the activities themselves, are simple gerunds: ing words that, by virtue of their lacking an object, refer simply to themselves. Placed in the context of unintroduced and unpunctuated dialogue, they have no reason for existence except their own play, which Barthelme masters in a way both pleasing and amusing to his readers. The effect is that of jazz improvisation, especially the style of two instruments trading four-bar phrases back and forth in such a way that each complements the other's action while still advancing its own, as happens in a section of “The New Music,” originally published in The New Yorker of October 2, 1978, as “Momma”:

—Momma didn't 'low no clarinet playing in here. Unfortunately.

—Momma.

—Momma didn't 'low no clarinet playing in here. Made me sad.

—Momma was outside.

—Momma was very outside.

—Sitting there, 'lowing and not-'lowing. In her old rocking chair.

—'Lowing this, not-'lowing that.

—Didn't 'low oboe.

—Didn't 'low gitfiddle. Vibes.

—Rock over your damn foot and bust it, you didn't pop to when she was 'lowing and not-'lowing.

—Right. 'Course, she had all the grease.

—True.

—You wanted a little grease, like to buy a damn comic book or something, you had to go to Momma.

—Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Her variously colored moods.

—Mauve. Warm gold. Citizen's blue.

—Mauve mood that got her thrown in the jug that time.

(GD, p. 29)

The European style of punctuating lines of dialogue makes them hang on the page, while their responsive rhythm creates a mood all its own: of reminiscing, another gerund that is even more convincing than the activities reported earlier, for now that activity is actually taking place.

Jazz provides a model for interacting rhythms, and is by nature an activity that represents nothing other than itself—postmodernism's own ideal for fictive writing. Even as a subject, it lets Barthelme take his narrative language further than other topics might always allow, as happens in a complementary story from Great Days, “The King of Jazz.” The title is referential—to the 1930 movie featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra—but also reflective of practices in and around jazz, including the occasion of “cutting sessions” (where players compete against each other in jam sessions) and the way critics like to assign labels (making the title ironic, for Whiteman's popularized music made him anything but an innovator or key figure).

“Well I'm the king of jazz now, thought Hokie Mokie to himself as he oiled the slide on his trombone,” the story begins—like many postmodern stories, just where a conventional tale would end. To reassure himself of such status Hokie plays a few notes out the window, which starts a critical dialogue between two passers-by. Can you tell who is playing, “Can you distinguish our great homemade American jazz performers, each from the other?” “Used to could,” the friend replies, anticipating Simon's own little riff in Paradise when he challenges himself to name ten influential drummers in the history of jazz. “Then who is playing?” Easy: “Sounds like Hokie Mokie to me. Those few but perfectly selected notes have the real epiphanic glow” (GD, p. 55), which is itself a snatch of the language generated so facilely by the first generation of jazz critics (nearly all of them afterhours professors from Columbia and Rutgers).

The story proceeds by letting this style of language generate itself, as the tropes of literary criticism and art commentary spin out endlessly in an attempt to capture the essence of Hokie Mokie's music—which is, of course, something that neither written words nor painted objects can approximate. It is when Hokie is challenged by a young Japanese musician that the king's truly great playing—and the critical listeners' most extravagant play of comparisons—begins:

“You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing the Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like—?”

(GD, p. 59)

This is not at all what Hokie sounds like, for words cannot be music, and the terms themselves, by virtue of their references, are contradictory (how can turkeys and beavers and polar bears all sound the same? They can't; but the speaker's language about them does!). The activity of such language does approximate the activity of Hokie playing jazz, and unleashing that verbal improvisation is what “The King of Jazz” lets Barthelme do.

His next collection both continues this special interest and confirms its supporting style in the canon. The volume is itself a gesture toward canon formation: a tall, closely printed book running 457 pages titled Sixty Stories (1981) that combines nine new short stories with another 51 (of a possible 120) from the earlier gatherings. Gone from the living record are such self-consciously difficult pieces as “Florence Green Is 81” and “Bone Bubbles”; also missing are the purposely flat narratives of “Edward and Pia” and “A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking.” In their place, Barthelme's emphasis falls on his earlier experiments with playful delight such as “Me and Miss Mandible” and “The Balloon,” while admitting two previously noncanonical pieces from Guilty Pleasures as full-fledged stories (and not just parodies)—a third will appear six years later in the companion volume, Forty Stories, to round out the author's hundred. There is even “A Manual for Sons” from The Dead Father, a self-contained story that employs similarly ludic devices and is written with the same sense of comic confidence that became the dominant mode of Amateurs and Great Days. From the latter, Sixty Stories reprints “The Crisis,” “The New Music,” and “The King of Jazz,” while the former collection is represented by “The School” and “Our Work and Why We Do It” in Sixty Stories and “Porcupines at the University” in Forty Stories.

What distinguishes any retrospective exhibition is not just selections from the past but the nature of new work being shown at the same time. The last decade of Donald Barthelme's life is dominated by these kinds of gatherings, with just one volume of previously uncollected stories in between: Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). But since both retrospectives add new material, his writer's development can still be traced even in these mature years of canon stabilization.

Of Barthelme's three books from the 1980s, Sixty Stories is the simplest and most direct in terms of growth, for rounding out its selections from the author's earlier collections are nine new stories. All were published between November 27, 1978, and January 26, 1981, in the wake of Great Days and before the gathering for Overnight to Many Distant Cities commenced. In length, number, historical proximity, and relative affinity and diversity, they are presented just like the samplings from other collections preceding them in Sixty Stories. Of the nine, five are dash-dialogue stories, while others relish the odd details that give Great Days its special flavor. One piece, “The Farewell,” picks up where “On the Steps of the Conservatory” left off, while another—“Bishop”—introduces the character whose similar story inaugurates the Overnight volume. Throughout the nine runs a consistent interest in language—not so much for the semiotic fascinations evident in Barthelme's earliest fiction, but more for the way certain nuances, drawn from various parts of the contemporary culture, form attractive and intriguing voices that can play off each other in dialogue or establish themselves as identifiable texts within the greater narrative.

Such voices, both by themselves and in conversation, are played to the full in “The Emerald,” Sixty Stories' most obvious contribution to the Barthelme style. Like the most radically experimental fictions of earlier collections, it was not first published in The New Yorker, but rather appeared in Esquire, in the November 1979 issue (and again in 1980 as a forty-page limited edition book published by Sylvester and Orphanos in Los Angeles). It is easily Barthelme's longest short story, eclipsing even “A Manual for Sons,” which is given such generic status here. Yet for all its length, “The Emerald” manages to move along very quickly thanks to its author's customary lightness of style and snappiness of juxtapositional transitions. The new element is a characterizational and appealingly vocal use of language, which is generated not by philosophers or advertising copywriters but by various people who sound like they come from the streets of Greenwich Village or the towns of East Texas (Barthelme's two principal residences) and who speak with the quaint angularity sure to catch the ear of such a creative artist. In the dialogue sections, oddly named characters (Tope, Sallywag, Wide Boy, Taptoe) rifle clichés back and forth (sure as shootin', right as rain) as they lay plans for stealing the emerald and cutting it up for profit. In sections of a more extended conversation, Moll—the emerald's mother—finds out as much about the interviewing journalist as the journalist finds out about Moll. The interview does reveal that the greatest threat to Moll's emerald comes from a witch hunter named Vandermaster, which sets the stage for a meeting between these two as the story's protagonist and principal antagonist. Their dialogue is the piece's most inventive one, he mixing Joycean word salad with redneck vernacular, she sounding like both a sorceress and a street-tough feminist. Yet even the subplot has its special humor, as the journalist and her subject are manipulated by an unscrupulous editor while the interview itself, undertaken as the stuff of prize winning journalism, often devolves into questions such as “do you have a chili recipe you'd care to share with the folks?” (SS, p. 413).

The nine new short fictions in Sixty Stories also indicate the step Barthelme would take in Overnight to Many Distant Cities, his 1983 volume that stands as the last gathering of previously uncollected work published during his lifetime. Though at first glance Overnight is one of his more radical experiments, its fascination with the tones and textures of language is evident in Sixty Stories' “Aria,” a 1979 New Yorker piece that stands as the first of the author's extended monologues. As an exercise in language, it complements the dash-dialogue stories by posing the reader as the story's other conversationalist. Or, if one wishes to remain uninvolved (something few postmodern readers can do), it can be said that the text in “Aria” interrogates itself. But in combination with such stories as “Bishop,” where the concerns of daily life are as common as they were in “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,” this new mode of writing is less like the impenetrability of “Bone Bubbles” and “Sentence” and much more like the tenor of the Overnight collection, where the same character (consistently named “Bishop”) is featured in the first full story and whose presence, as an icon of the author's own life in this world, remains a constant source of language and generator of narrative action.

The innovative nature of Overnight to Many Distant Cities is announced on its table of contents, for instead of listing the customary fourteen to sixteen new short stories, it alternates the titles of a dozen such pieces with the initial words (followed by three dots) of much shorter items in between. This structural distinction carries into the book itself, where the full-length fictions are printed in roman type while the miniatures are set in italics. The writing is all Barthelme's, and most of it is even from The New Yorker, with the occasional piece from another venue accommodated quite naturally within this new format. But the range of these materials is quite impressive, stretching from the author's main-line short stories to his unsigned “Comment” pieces from The New Yorker's front pages, together with stories from such places as Harper's and New American Review and a contribution that first appeared in an art gallery's catalog. In the past, “Comment” and catalog writings had been consigned to a separate volume, Great Days, and then began appearing in other collections as exceptions rather than the rule. But with Overnight to Many Distant Cities a structure is devised to integrate the author's signed and unsigned work.

The obvious precedent for structuring a short story collection in this manner is Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925). For this work the accepted interpretation is that by interleaving his fifteen full-length stories with an equal number of short, italicized passages Hemingway was able to have the cultural shock of World War I permeate the otherwise domestic business of such fictions as “The Three Day Blow,” “The End of Something,” and the two parts of “Big Two-Hearted River.” Turning to Barthelme's experiment over half a century later, one must ask if the postmodern writer is using his own italicized interleavings for transitions, as associations, or for other reflective purposes. Unlike Hemingway, Barthelme has no agenda: there is nothing in Overnight to Many Distant Cities to suggest that one orders and controls in the imaginative life (Hemingway's roman typeface stories) what cannot be controlled in life (In Our Time's italicized “chapters”); nor is there any hint that art is neat while the world's a mess. For Barthelme, the eminent postmodernist, life and art are sometimes identical, driven as the former is by the latter's organizing principles. It is the interplay between Overnight's full stories and brief interpolations that establishes this principle not just as a thematic reference or technical trick but as a creative force in Donald Barthelme's work.

Story after story in Overnight to Many Distant Cities features characters caught up in the world of textuality, struggling to read their way through a culture where signs can be of more substance than the reality they might be presumed to signify. In “Visitors,” the familiar protagonist named Bishop encounters movies, commercials, labels from art history, and made-for-seduction recipes during the summer interval when his fifteen-year-old daughter visits him. From this textual mélange he extracts a recipe for curing her persistent stomach ache—not a menu item, but a snappy chalk talk on the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. In “Affection” a married couple close to estrangement consult various textual sources for advice, from mother to fortune teller (Madam Olympia) and blues pianist (Sweet Pappa Cream Puff), all of whom contribute to the couple's eventual intertext, which is survived only thanks to the husband's increased earnings and his ability to not only read the New York Times but “wash it off my hands when I have finished reading it, every day” (O, p. 36). This theme continues through the volume, as Barthelme complements these recent stories with older material that had sat uncollected since 1971, such as “The Mothball Fleet” (where, in his more familiar manner of taking a metaphor and fleshing it out ad absurdum, the navy's flotilla of mothballed destroyers sails down the Hudson as real and as startling as the ship San Dominick encountered in Melville's “Benito Cereno”) and “The Sea of Hesitation” (where the narrator is beset by texts cascading from his past, including quotations from Civil War history and phone calls from his ex-wife).

What makes the volume different, however, and what justifies the author's resurrection of these older stories (which otherwise may have remained noncanonical, or at the very least so repetitious of outdated, minor trends that reprinting them would be redundant) is the function of the brief, italicized interleavings. These passages, never bearing a title and taking their table-of-contents identification from the egalitarianism of their opening words, form a larger continuous text in which the titled stories are set as intertexts. As a context for stories that are often about lives being lived within texts (movies, commercials, advertisements, letters, telephone calls, references to books and history), the interleavings have the latitude to speak either more abstractly or more specifically about such circumstances, and by doing so yield a continuity of literary action that shows how the otherwise diverse weavings of Overnight to Many Distant Cities are in fact cut from the same broad cloth—a multiform cloth to be sure, produced as it has been by the master weaver of stories, Donald Barthelme.

The situation of a typical story, “Affection,” is a good example of how Barthelme's method works. Preceding it is the two-and-one-half-page passage beginning “Financially, the paper”; the narrative voice in this particular interpolation is that of a writer whose newspaper is financially healthy but journalistically weak, its portfolio fattened by diversification into everything from mining to greeting cards and its real-estate, food, clothing, plant, and furniture sections growing larger each week, at the same time that hard news and editorial depth suffer. Typically for the times, the problem is being treated systematically, even as the system in question (management levels) falters:

The Editor's Caucus has once again applied to middle management for relief, and has once again been promised it (but middle management has Glenfiddich on its breath, even at breakfast). Top management's polls say that sixty-five percent of the readers “want movies,” and feasibility studies are being conducted. Top management acknowledges, over long lunches at good restaurants, that the readers are wrong to “want movies” but insists that morality cannot be legislated. The newsroom has been insulated (with products from the company's Echotex division) so that the people in the newsroom can no longer hear the sounds in the streets.

(O, p. 24)

Brief as it is, the interleaved passage profits from Barthelme's ability to take a limited number of factors—the newspaper's other divisions, the decline of its traditional standards, the lavish life style of its top management and the alcohol-ridden anxiety of the middle managers—and let their interactive energy combine to generate a tight little narrative. But in the setting of Overnight to Many Distant Cities, it performs a structural function as well, enfolding (with “I put a name in an envelope …,” which follows) the more conventionally written and published story, “Affection.”

“Affection” itself features a newspaper only in its final paragraph, where its print is something that informs the husband-narrator (threatening to estrange him from his wife) but which also can be washed away (thus saving the marriage). Along the way to this conclusion are just the influences that have fattened up certain sections of the paper while slimming down others, although for the couple's life as lived these influences are encountered firsthand. The wife's chief advisor is her mother, whose “counsel is broccoli, mostly, but who else was she going to talk to?” (O, p. 30). When the husband consults his own advisor, Madam Olympia, her patois rendering of a typical marital conversation uncovers the “agendas on both sides” (O, p. 31). Subsequent textual renderings come from the languages of TV soap opera, psychiatry, and the blues. As for the couple's problems, they're solved only by a sudden influx of new money—something wily Madam Olympia has expected would have to happen from the start.

From here Barthelme moves to an abstract piece, “I put a name in an envelope …,” which first appeared as part of Joseph Cornell: Catalogue of the Exhibition, February 28-March 20, 1976, published by the Leo Castelli Gallery. In the unpaged catalog's preface, designer-editor Sandra Leonard Starr thanks the author, “who has loved Cornell's work for a very long time, for saying he couldn't think of anything to write and writing anyway.” Its apparent abstraction and self-advertised insouciance do not detract from its fictive excellence, both in itself and as an interpolation within Overnight to Many Distant Cities; in fact, the piece is as well organized and as indicative of Barthelme's aesthetic as his catalog preface to the exhibit of women in art from 2500 b.c. to the present, She (New York: Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, 3 December 1970 to 16 January 1971). There the author had posited woman as an imaginary being, an absent referent present only in the empty space she would otherwise be occupying. For Joseph Cornell, Barthelme casts out a similar net, retrieves nothing, but discovers that Cornell has become his net. For the Castelli catalog, he presents a single page typed on his own ibm Selectric; photocopied in facsimile fashion, it is folded twice and placed in an envelope, just as its first line describes; the stuffed envelope then becomes one of the several loose items gathered into the catalog, which is itself a two-pocket folder holding several individual pages and photographs. Reading the catalog thus becomes much like viewing a Cornell artwork, as the various free-standing yet compositionally integral elements are sorted out and comprehended both as entities and as parts of a whole. Reading Barthelme's page in the catalog or on the pages in Overnight to Many Distant Cities replicates this process, and in the latter case also supplies a context for “Affection” preceding it and “Lightning” to follow.

Like one of Joseph Cornell's boxes, Barthelme's page recycles discrete but personally treasured items in a way that produces a new artistic whole. “Affection” has shown an unhappily married couple doing much the same with the fragmented texts of their lives, the bonding agent being another printed text: money. “Lightning” poses a single protagonist who must deal with similar intertexts even as he struggles to write and live one of his own. Freelancing for a People-like weekly called Folks, he must take assignments on human-interest topics (such as people struck by lightning); the story's length is dictated by concerns of layout, while its focus must be, in his editor's words, on a subject who is not only “pretty sensational” but “slightly wonderful” (O, p. 41). His own career as a writer has taken him down a path much like the husband's in “Affection,” compromising ideals in order to earn more money to please his wife; but at this later stage he has lost his wife and quit the job for the textual bliss of freelancing according to his whims and fancies, with just the occasional high-paying job for Folks to keep him in rent and liquor.

This writer's human-interest feature on interesting people struck by lightning turns out to be a harvesting of recycled parts: nearly every one of his subjects has a grandparent who was struck by lightning as well (usually struck off a buckboard in 1910) and has fastened on an authoritative text to interpret his or her event. The writer himself becomes format-driven, blanching when a second respondent also has a husband named Marty—“Two Martys in the same piece?” (O, p. 44). But at this point he is figuratively struck by lightning himself, falling in love with this woman who is not only slightly wonderful but capable of enfolding him within the text of her own life, made as it is of trendy, manufactured images. Drunk with love, he tries to seduce her with a story generated out of fragments from his public relations work for Texas oil. But all that succeeds is the Folks layout, expanded as it is for this woman of his dreams who has become, in his editor's words, “approximately fantastic” (O, p. 51).

Through these stories and their interleavings Barthelme has woven a larger text whose strands remain distinct even as they become mutually enhancing. As intertextual elements exist within the volume's full-length New Yorker stories, so do those stories themselves function intertextually within the collection's larger narrative movement as carried forth by the italicized interleavings. By themselves, Overnight's titled stories are reminiscent of an earlier Barthelme or, as with “Captain Blood,” of Barthelme's colleagues in postmodern fiction—one thinks of Robert Coover's classic reversal of the Casey at the Bat narrative, “McDuff on the Mound,” when reading Barthelme's hilarious account of a textually correct but contextually inappropriate John Paul Jones speaking his historic lines prematurely and to the wrong auditor. Arranged as they are in Overnight, however, these stories not only reinforce each other, as should happen in a decently arranged collection, but are situated within a larger whole that the interleavings sustain. Should the reader wonder what type of literature is “Captain Blood,” there follows an interleaving in the form of conceptual art, “A woman seated on a plain wooden chair …,” the nature of which suggests that there can be conceptual fiction as well (which “Captain Blood” certainly is). If “Conversations with Goethe” seems at first like a single-joke story (the master's one-sided conversations consisting of aphoristic similes rushing pell-mell into absurdity), the interleaving that follows draws directly on American popular culture to show how the same thing happens when the fans of country and western music dote on the lyrics of their heroes. Finally, in the volume's title story, the larger narrative concludes with these italicized interpolations incorporated directly into the text.

Four years later, in the volume complementing Sixty Stories and rounding off his hundred presumably best stories, Donald Barthelme reprints “Overnight to Many Distant Cities.” But among these Forty Stories are no less than eleven others from the Overnight volume, more than from any single collection recalled for service in his first retrospective. True, Forty Stories also takes a second sampling from books as far back as Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and draws so many additional pieces from City Life and especially Sadness as to make those collections' representation among the favored hundred almost complete, with only the extremes of obtuseness (“Bone Bubbles”) and obviousness (“Brain Damage,” “Perpetua,” and “Subpoena”) missing. Yet the special nature of Overnight to Many Distant Cities as an integral volume is lost, for the stories are not only presented in a different order (as Barthelme had done for the collections covered in Sixty Stories) but are scattered throughout Forty Stories almost randomly, a departure from his earlier retrospective practice of keeping each volume's selections together. As a final blow to Overnight's special nature, the typographical and titular distinctions between the mainline stories and the interpolations are effaced, making each one just one more equal addition to the Barthelme canon.

The special task of Forty Stories, however, is to complete an even larger whole—a whole much greater than the sum of its individual parts. In this sense, the material comprising Overnight to Many Distant Cities can be read two ways: as a volume that can stand alone almost as easily and completely as do any of the author's novels, or serving as examples of his short story artistry, twelve of which he selects, along with nine quite recent and therefore previously uncollected stories, to represent the latest developments in his work.

These twenty-one pieces reveal a Barthelme as comfortable and as playful as the writer Sixty Stories portrays, but also as an author committed to drawing openly and directly on his own experience. In stories such as “Visitors,” “Affection,” and “Lightning” (all of which are reprinted here), bits and pieces of Donald Barthelme's life could be recognized, but were always couched within the conventions of fiction: different names, similar but not identical professions, and only a generalized reference to locale (Texas, but not specifically Houston; New York City, but only occasionally an address identifiable as Greenwich Village). But by choosing his unsigned New Yorker “Comment” piece identified as “When he came …” in Overnight to Many Distant Cities and running it as a full-fledged, co-equal story under the title of “The New Owner,” Barthelme takes a step as obvious as when selecting his parodies and satires (previously sequestered in Guilty Pleasures) for canonization in Sixty Stories. In 1978, for a limited edition titled Here in the Village published with the Lord John Press in Northridge, California, he had gathered up eleven such unsigned columns and added his Cordier & Ekstrom catalog preface on images of women in art to form an entertaining, engaging, and self-exploratory look at the real Donald Barthelme living on New York's West 11th Street. Even as that volume appeared, the text presented as “The New Owner” in Forty Stories was being debuted as an unsigned “Comment” essay in The New Yorker for December 4, 1978, leading off the magazine's editorial section on page 21. From here its progress is revealing, not just because it brings an element of Here in the Village into Overnight to Many Distant Cities, but because even that presence, interpolative as it was, now becomes mainstream in the retrospective collection that rounds out Barthelme's career as a short story writer.

Of the author's signed New Yorker stories published since Overnight, only “Kissing the President” (August 1, 1983) is passed over. Of the nine included, a few tend toward abstraction, but the great majority are evocative of experiences and locales in Barthelme's very real world. The 1980s had seen him return home to Texas for part of each year and a chair at the University of Houston, his alma mater, and in “Sinbad” he unites the abstract and referential streams of his later work by crafting a story in which the protagonist is at once Sinbad the Sailor washed up on the figurative beach of middle age at the same time he's teaching a writing class at an all too typical southwestern university, where he rescues a failing pedagogic situation by realizing “I have something to teach. Be like Sinbad! Venture forth! Embosom the waves, let your shoes be sucked from your feet and your very trousers enticed by the frothing deep. The ambiguous sea awaits, I told them, marry it!” (FS, p. 34).

“The point of my career is perhaps how little I achieved” (FS, p. 256), concludes the journalist-turned-religion-writer being interviewed in “January,” Forty Stories' last selection. As a piece of fiction, it interrogates itself—how odd that for all of Donald Barthelme's experiments with form, he waits until almost the very end before trying the same format so many critics, including myself, had used to generate texts, presenting him with studious questions to which he would reply in kind, much as does the character Thomas Brecker in this piece. The point of “January,” however, is that viewing a lifetime's remarkable achievements as “so little” is the best way to keep one's self alive. The title, after all, is not “November” or “December,” but rather the year's coldest month, the depth of winter, which is nevertheless the start of something entirely new. Forty Stories, providing as it does the larger context and canonical status for Here in the Village, may well be the January of Barthelme's career—not as a living author but as one for the ages.