[In the following excerpt, Hulbert states that in Barthelme's short story collection Moon Deluxe, the author "probes only-far enough to note that his characters are always lonely and often nervous."]

The men in Frederick Barthelme's story collection [Moon Deluxe] don't have women they can rely on, and lead irresolute lives as beauties come and go. They are roughly the same age as [Nicholas] Delbanco's characters [in About My Table] but the external similarities end there. Single, they live in the Southwest in a garish landscape of bright blue pools, lobster-pink stucco bungalow fast-food places with "oversize foul-color wrapped-in-clear-vinyl menus" worlds away from the natural hues of Delbanco's New England. Those who are employed—and most of these aimless men have no discernible occupation—work for "a company"; what kind of company, or in what kinds of jobs, we never learn. Their main activity consists in puzzling, passive encounters with women.

The interior lives of Barthelme's protagonists are more difficult to describe, even though most of the stories are narrated in the first person. These men are eerily impassive, apparently mesmerized by their gleaming surroundings—especially by sleek women (one man spends days fixated on a succession of gorgeous salesgirls at a mall). In seventeen super-realistically sharp, sometimes funny, but finally inscrutable stories (most of which previously appeared in The New Yorker). Barthelme probes only far enough to note that his characters are always lonely and often nervous.

Women are what make them nervous. Generally younger than the narrators, Barthelme's female characters are energetically bizarre where Delbanco's are businesslike, but they too are the assertive figures—not the men. Antonia of the title story is perhaps the most intimidating eyeful of them all:

… she's huge, extraordinary, easily over six feet. Taller than you. Her skin is glass-smooth and her pale eyes are a watery turquoise. Her hair is parted on one side and brushed flat back to her scalp. She [is] … wearing khaki shorts and a white T-shirt with "So many men, so little time" silk-screened in two lines across the chest.

As that motto suggests, these women are hungry and in a hurry, and they seem to have Barthelme's quiet men at their mercy. They corral them into cars, jabber at them, impose on them, dump them, while the men nod and feel nervous. Like so many women of yore, the men appear to be ciphers until these manic creatures arrive and rouse them. While the men wait, Barthelme frequently describes them cleaning, like fastidious housewives—emptying the refrigerator, vacuuming the carpet. When they're out with women, they're usually eating, like children—playing with their peas, piling up one-inch squares of roast beef, arranging cream containers into football teams.

What they rarely resemble are grown-up men. They take graphic note of women's bodies, but seem strangely disembodied themselves, conveying no sign of sexual energy. In fact, they're often so aloof that women lose interest (some of them inclining instead to sinister men, or to other women). This female fickleness in turn seems to confirm the men in their cautiousness, although they never reveal their thoughts or hearts. In one story, "Lumber," the subject of relations between the sexes explicitly arises—it's the implicit theme of all of the stories—but the discussion does little to clarify the protagonist's, or Bartheime's, view of the matter. Milby, one of several peripheral brutes in the collection, has just hit his girlfriend Lois and wants to discuss his brutishness with the narrator. "So talk, already," Lois's friend Cherry tells the two men impatiently. "Go get a steak and talk. Be men all over the place. Practice spitting." The docile narrator hardly knows how to rise to this occasion, of course, and he's not sure what to tell Milby, whose anger is so alien to him. "The thing is," Milby sputters over the steak,

"they take advantage of everything—all the differences—but you can't. You get pissed after a while."

"Everybody gets pissed." I wonder why I don't tell him what I want to tell him, why he scares me. "Who's this 'they' anyway?"

"The bitches—what are you, some Holy Ghost or something? I don't need catechism lessons, brother. It's jerks like you screw it up for the rest of us. I'm telling you it just happens, and you're telling me Hail Mary, full of grace. That's a big help."

"Yeah, O.K.," I say, cutting through my steak. "You're probably right."

It's obvious that he doesn't really think Milby is right, but it's equally clear that this uneasy narrator, like the others in the collection, has no clue about what to expect of women—how much bitchiness, how much sympathy—or of himself.

In their confusion, Barthelme's men generally resort to some version of the gawky nerd gambit: "Hoping for quick intimacy," says the narrator of "Rain Check," "I start telling Lucille the things I'm afraid of." It's hopeless: "Lucille says she's not afraid of anything, so I shut up about loneliness." And when at the very end of the story Lucille apparently decides she's ready for intimacy and asks, "So. What about a shower?" the narrator is as insecure as ever, but cagier now:

I give her a long look, letting the silence mount up. I stand there with her for a good two minutes, without saying a word, trying to outwait her, trying to see what's what…. She smiles at me as if she really does like me. Maybe we've been there longer than two minutes, but when the smile comes, I see her lips a little bit apart and her slightly hooded eyes, and she traces her fingers down my arm from the elbow to the wrist and stops there, loosely hooking her fingernails inside my shirt cuff, pinching my skin with her nails.

However lost and lonely these men may be, they are leery about being found by the reptilian women who abound, and Barthelme doesn't seem to blame them….