[In the following excerpt, Cheuse asserts that the stories in Barthelme's Chroma, show "America in hard-edge patterns, colored vividly but with a certain remoteness of the heart."]

Spring—and the story collections are busting out all over. For those of you who awoke into your lives as serious readers only in this decade you'll believe, upon reading these specific spring books [all of which I recommend], that the recent, much-discussed American short story renaissance is still upon us. For those of you who remember Sherwood Anderson, you'll recall that from early in this century onward American writers turned the genre into multiple worlds in the short form, and a truly national treasure.

Nothing could appear more American than the style Frederick Barthelme has been trying over the last few years to perfect. As in the moment in the story from this collection, [Chroma,] called "Cut Glass" when a man sits in his Chicago hotel room and studies high-tech architecture magazines with photographs of homes "in which plainness is elevated to unbearable beauty," Barthelme tries time after time to strip away the excess in our lives [and the fat in our rhetoric] to produce a story both usefully spare and accidentally beautiful. Sometimes this works well, as in the lead story in this group "Driver." A California couple, now staid and middle-class but once long ago quite wild, recapture some of their old strangeness by trading their Toyota wagon for a low-riding customized Lincoln. "There was an airbrush illustration on the side, between the front and rear wheel wells—a picture of the Blessed Virgin, in aqua-and-white robes, strolling in an orange grove, behind each tree of which was a wolf, lip-curled, saliva shining."

That's about as ferocious as Barthelme's stories get—on the surface. But each sentence is so carefully, so seductively plain and seemingly innocent that the reader doesn't notice the meannness and the madness of this writer's U.S.A. until it's too late. That's in the best stories. In others, the passions of his version of our culture seem so elusive that the writer's passion to put them into narrative remains absent as well, and the reader, like the driver in the short-short "Trick Scenery," discovers that the "splash of your headlights on the road illuminates nothing."

In order to see America in hard-edge patterns, colored vividly but with a certain remoteness of the heart, try these stories. But not too many at one sitting….