Analysis
Frederick Barthelme’s short stories are frequently offered as examples of “minimalism.” Focusing on the surface of events, minimalism generally refuses to delve into a character’s psychological motivations and avoids overt narratorial commentary. Because this style is often attacked for its supposed moral defeatism and lack of historical sensibility, it is especially useful to consider Barthelme’s essay “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean” (1988) when examining his writing. In this playful manifesto, Barthelme maintains that minimalist stories deliberately react against the postmodernist obsession with language, while simultaneously rejecting conventional realism. Human experience, according to Barthelme, “is so enigmatic that only the barest suspicion of it can be got on the page with any assurance.”
Barthelme usually sets his stories in malls, restaurants, and apartment complexes, rendering a vision of contemporary America that fastens upon the subdued sublimities of day-to-day existence. Suggesting that most people overlook or repress the weird peculiarity of the objects and situations they face in their daily lives, Barthelme augments the uncanny dimensions of suburban experience through stylistic experimentation. Narrators startle the reader by using the second-person form of address (“you”); everyday objects take on qualities independent from their common uses, creating an atmosphere that is both disturbing and quietly celebratory. Usefully locating this fiction within the literary mode of the “grotesque,” Robert H. Brinkmeyer maintains that Barthelme’s fiction “knots together the alien with the familiar and challenges the beholder to resolve the ambivalence that this intermingling evokes.”
Uncomfortable in their lives and with each other, yet at ease with incongruity, Barthelme’s characters find little to distinguish public from private experience. Although they are keen observers of their environments’ particularities, popular culture often forms the basis of their relationship with each other and the world. Desiring change while suspecting that attempts at personal transformation will only be cosmetic or, worse, result in self-deception, these characters face the confusions of late twentieth century life with integrity and an appreciable curiosity. Critic Timothy Peters detects a modest heroism in their unwillingness “to look back, to be nostalgic, or even to scheme for a more aesthetically or materially rewarding future.”
“Shopgirls”
“Shopgirls,” from Moon Deluxe , encapsulates one of the central themes of Barthelme’s work: how a consumer-and media-based culture influences the men and women who live within it. Initially set in a mall, “Shopgirls” follows a chronic voyeur who scrutinizes the female clerks in a department store. Andrea, who oversees purses, forces an encounter with the narrator, surprisingly inviting him to have lunch with the various women he has been observing. They tease and fawn over him, then bicker among themselves, after which Andrea invites him to spend the night. In her apartment, she relates a bizarre story about her hurricane-obsessed father, who once attempted suicide when a storm failed to arrive, leaving him crippled. The couple does not sleep together; instead, the narrator fantasizes about further voyeuristic meanderings on another floor of the department store. When, during lunch, one of the women confesses that their cultural obligation is to “make the women feel envious and men feel cheated,” the reader sees voyeurism’s frustrating disconnections extending to social relations as a whole. Barthelme’s innovative narrative strategy—the subject of the narration is a second-person “you”—is a practice drawn from film. Skillfully manipulating readers into identifying with situations to which most would be unaccustomed, this technique resembles the way an audience unconsciously adopts a motion picture camera’s point of view. Although Barthelme often uses this stylistic maneuver, his particular application of it in “Shopgirls” heightens the story’s emphasis on voyeurism, foregrounding the degree to which media technology and the image have...
(This entire section contains 1677 words.)
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influenced contemporary American culture.
“Safeway”
“Safeway,” from Moon Deluxe, employs one of Barthelme’s favorite plot devices: A man and woman negotiate the unpredictable waters of initiating a sexual relationship. “Safeway” also adopts the second-person, but on this occasion, “you” are directed through the viewpoint of a man shopping for waffles. Waiting in the checkout line with Sarah, a woman he has just met, the narrator becomes embroiled in the unexplained anger of two men. These men add a peculiar twist to the story when one of them refers to a photograph of the other’s wife. She is standing in front of a Confederate painting with a cast on one leg, supported by cane from World War I, presumably in a pornographic pose. Barthelme passes quickly over this startling image, devoting the remainder of the story to Sarah and the narrator flirting in a restaurant, making plans for a tryst. No affair begins because the narrator gives Sarah a false address to his apartment, the story offering no rationale for his deception. Inundating the story with brand names, Barthelme shows individuals being evaluated on the basis of their consumer choices. When someone glances at the narrator after noticing his waffles, he recognizes that “his opinion of your entire life is instantly communicated.” Brand names also provide the only reliability in a life controlled by chance.
Because the narrator is keenly observant of the “random data” his day presents to him, Barthelme implies that one’s understanding of the world is thoroughly shaped by the incidental. Although the narrator is acutely sensitive to the nuances of his environment—the grocery store’s “parking lot [has] a close, magical look”—he seems oblivious to the workings of his mind, as his playing football with the cream cartons in the restaurant demonstrates. This equivocation of significance affects interpretation. The nuns in their “brilliant blue habits” would ordinarily suggest a religious symbol; here, however, such a moment is a visual tableau rather than a sign of potential redemption. Similarly, the historically ironic photograph contributes to the story’s atmosphere without offering a readily understandable meaning. This commitment to unrooted images connects Barthelme to postmodernism.
“Driver”
This story from Chroma fulfills Brinkmeyer’s comment that almost all “of Barthelme’s protagonists are haunted by the fear that their lives are ordered but repetitious, without worry but without wonder.” While the narrator’s wife, Rita, sleeps, he watches a television program on customized low-riding cars. The next morning he trades in his Toyota for a low-rider airbrushed with a painting showing the Virgin Mary surrounded by salivating wolves. If the narrator is going through a mid-life crisis, it is not the usual kind. Going out for a drive with Rita, he finds her delightful. Discovering kids roller skating in a parking lot, Rita comments on the scene’s “amazing” charm. Later, the narrator channel surfs almost until dawn, when he decides to take the car out again. The deserted downtown looks “like one of those end-of-the-world movies.” Once again, he stops in a parking lot, convincing two dogs that had been chasing a bird to get into the car. Heading home, he tells the dogs about his dissatisfactory old life. The narrator’s admiration of the dogs’ single-minded pursuit coincides with his own gratification in having followed a series of impulses. His astonished perception that a larger reality has been going on outside his previously confined, egocentric existence leads to a classic epiphany. Whether Barthelme undercuts this private revelation by having the narrator recount it to the uncomprehending dogs depends on the reader. The diverse references scattered throughout “Driver” complicate its emotional range. Hollywood’s generic films are juxtaposed uneasily with the untapped story that the man who painted the discomfiting image on the car died in Vietnam. Should the reader be suspicious when the narrator drives around his secretary’s apartment? Why are the dogs identical twins and what of their owner or owners? By hinting at but not resolving these narrative dilemmas, Barthelme dramatizes the claim in “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean” that an empty parking lot “might as well be an ancient temple.”
“Chroma”
The title story from this collection reveals an intricate network of sexual politics. The narrator’s wife, Alicia, spends alternate weekends with her young lover, George. Next door live Juliet and Heather, a lesbian couple, although Juliet offers to sleep with the narrator to offset Alicia’s infidelity. On a weekend when Alicia is supposed to be with George, she returns home early, the story concluding with the narrator sitting beside the bathtub, overcome by Alicia’s loveliness while he watches her bathe. Barthelme does not judge this unusual sexual dynamic, but neither does he gloss over the pain, anger, and confused tenderness shared by these people. The word “chroma” refers to a pure color, suggesting the subtle but distinctly rendered portrayals of the four major characters. Like many of Barthelme’s stories, “Chroma” is written in the present tense; in this instance, the effect is to magnify the inherent perplexities of time. Early in the story, Juliet and the narrator have a late breakfast in a section of town that has been subject to urban renewal. After rejecting many of the restaurants, they choose an old restaurant which also has its faults, but it has “been there for thirty years, so all the things wrong with it are deeply wrong.” Age confers authenticity over fashion. The narrator worries over saying things to Juliet that will be true in the present moment but will seem false at a later time. The notion that the passing of events reconfigures, even mitigates, their original importance becomes clear when Juliet plays Nat King Cole on a tape—not the original record, Barthelme notes—and the narrator suddenly remembers what it was like to hear the music for the first time decades earlier. To the narrator, people float along the surface of time without truly living within it, a condition that undermines communication and self-knowledge. Alicia’s remarks when the narrator queries her on a seemingly meaningful gesture—“If I thought something I only thought it for a second and I don’t remember what it was, so leave me alone”—typify the isolation and bewilderment caused by temporal experience. If the couple’s relationship is erratic, it provides the narrator with a complex understanding of time.