[In the following review, Hempel asserts that "if Mr. Barthelme has not here beat his own best time, Natural Selection is still a natural progression from the novels that came before."]

Since the appearance in 1983 of Moon Deluxe, Frederick Barthelme's remarkable first collection of stories, one of the constants in his highly praised fiction has been his dead-on presentation of suburban life, of an apartment-complex and mall culture where, as the Holiday Inn slogan puts it, "the best surprise is no surprise." Another constant has been a quality of fast, fresh exchange that makes the dialogue in so many other novels and stories sound like—dialogue. In addition, there has been a tendency for Mr. Barthelme's estranged and self-mockingly "modern" couples to turn into triangles: husband, former wife and former wife's sister (Tracer); husband, wife and wife's boyfriend (Two against One); husband, wife and husband's first wife (Second Marriage). On television, these folks would star in "I Love Loosely."

In Natural Selection, Mr. Barthelme's fourth novel, Peter and Lily Wexler's marriage is more the casualty than the cause of their problems—or, more specifically, of his problems. Peter is a 40-year-old fellow who works in "facilitation consulting" and lives in Lazy Lakes, a lakeless subdivision of Houston, not so far from "the new wish-I-was-designed-by-a-famous-architectconvention center." He's the kind of guy who instinctively finds flaws and, as befits a Barthelme character, is characteristically witty about his disillusionment.

Peter's complaints are all-encompassing—"no less real for being middle-class"—and are inspired by everything from unscrupulous politicians to his 15-year practice of correcting the spelling in his wife's shopping lists (never in all that time, he notes, has she spelled "raisin" correctly). Still, he's got to wonder whether he's entitled to these laments. According to the news media, Peter tells us, people like him have "no business being angry. Genuine anger was the province of poor, ignorant, violent people … people driven by the elemental. Only poverty, cruelty, and abuse earned the large emotions…. Embarrassed by our collective good fortune, the journalists redefined authenticity as the kingdom of the raw." This, Peter adds, makes it "a hard life for the non-poor." "Yeah, you've got it rough," his wife says to him. "Tote that bale." Yet she says she'll wait it out. "Flail away," she tells him.

Thinking that the absence of someone to complain to might slow him down, Peter leaves Lily and their baffled son, Charles, a nearly-10-year-old who is thinking of changing his name to Laramie, and moves into another house in another subdivision 10 miles away—this after an "odd, tough, quick talk" in which he tells his wife he is "tired in a new way." "This isn't about disaffection or disconnection or dysfunction," he informs her, "it's about hiding." Off alone in his new house, he has "no goal except to be more easygoing, to let stuff roll off my back more readily; in the meantime I was going private."

In Natural Selection, Mr. Barthelme has once again given us people who are staying together but living apart. Here, though, the extramarital doings are incidental; in the course of the separation, Peter has a brief interlude with the former wife of his brother-in-law, Ray, whom he has earlier described as "the bad brother, given to jumbo concepts and get-garish-quick schemes untainted by the reek of success; I liked him."

Peter tempts fate at one point—and his feelings are echoed by his wife—when he allows that things would be simpler, more obvious and less confusing, if something really awful happened. "When things start to look O.K.," he says, "the problems get intricate and insidious." In the meantime, in a macabre kind of bonding, Peter spends some quality time with his son composing a make-believe suicide note. Charles's advice is to make it gruesome. Peter then tries out a gory, excessive version on the boy. "Way to go, Dad" is his son's response.

There is no one thing, no epiphany, that signals to Peter that reconciliation with Lily is really the way to go. But suddenly he finds that he no longer needs to point out the rampant bad behavior he sees in every direction. "I figured other people learned this at sixteen," he thinks, "but for me it was a breakthrough at forty."

Why, then, did this storm of fault-finding come and go? "Who knew?" says Peter. Maybe this, maybe that. Which, if vague, is at least true to life.

Natural Selection is not as funny or full as Second Marriage, nor as odd as Tracer. It does not have the interior complexity of Two against One. But if Mr. Barthelme has not here beat his own best time, Natural Selection is still a natural progression from the novels that came before. Sure we continue to be disillusioned and dispirited. But the shocker of the ending to this latest book serves as an old-fashioned moral. Maybe, Mr. Barthelme seems to say, we don't know how good we've got it. Maybe we had better buckle down.