[In the following review, Burroway discusses the arbitrary world of Barthelme's The Brothers.]

There are by now two full generations of Hemingway progeny. The first—exemplified by James Dickey. Harry Crews and Barry Hannah—has stayed in the wild, testing death, alert to betrayal and the bizarre cruelties of nature. The grandsons are more domesticated, likely to live in suburbia. They are nevertheless tough and soft in the same places. Their characters are almost honorable and never quite defeated; they take the strange in stride, and get on in spite of pain; they talk plain, a signal of their sincerity; they need women, and are baffled by their need. Among the grandsons are Richard Ford, whose characters' bafflement is a style in itself, and Tim O'Brien, who sends the innocents off to war in a prose that swings artfully between parody and homage.

Frederick Barthelme is also of this breed, though he brings his characters and their dogged heroism into a world more arbitrary than alienated (divorce is the dark continent), a place of amiable junk and dangers emerging out of left field, through which they mosey, talking hipster Huck.

In his novel Tracer, a recently divorced man goes to the Gulf Coast of Florida and fools around with the sister of his ex-wife. In Mr. Barthelme's fine and funny new novel, The Brothers, a recently divorced man goes to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and fools around with the wife of his brother. Neither affair turns out too well, but the pattern of lust, recrimination and acceptance has a kind of haphazard authenticity for both the reader and the parties concerned. Haphazard is the operative word.

Del Tribute arrives in Biloxi in a 16-foot Ryder rent-a-truck because his former father-in-law has given him a condo as a consolation prize. Del's brother, Bud, lives in Biloxi, teaching college in a desultory sort of way; but at the moment he is in California chasing some phantasm of a film career, and the condo is occupied, so Del settles in for the duration with his sister-in-law, Margaret. The two are mutually attracted; they touch and retreat, approach and avoid, don't quite avoid—a 1950's-style tease fest on the sofa. They aren't sure whether they are doing something wrong or even something likely to cause trouble.

Eventually, Bud comes home, the tenant moves out, Del moves in to the condo and takes up with Jen, a sexy fellow drifter young enough to make him feel his age, which is 44 going on 50. Jen is satiny and sassy. She puts out a Day-Glo news bulletin of the goriest stories she can find on her nifty worldwide computer setup. She does stranglers, shot moms, barbecued dogs, detached thumbs, kittens in Ziploc freezer bags. She can't settle on a name for the magazine, which title-surfs from Blood & Slime Weekly to Organ Meats to Warm Digits, but she understands perfectly well why she publishes it. The stories are "easy to follow, easy to understand. You don't get lost, and you don't have to worry about what things mean all the time."

For Del and Jen and Bud and Margaret, things go O.K.; things go along. The problem is that there's just no telling when Jen or, more threateningly, Bud will stir up the uncertain murk of that quasi-incestuous fooling around. You can't tell if it matters, or if the trouble it caused is over with, or if it ever will be. You have to keep worrying about what it means all the time.

Images of drift, passivity and choicelessness pervade every page and even the most violent events of The Brothers. We know very little about the marriage that broke up before the novel began, only that Del thinks of it as "still out there, circling in space but lost to the participants." Nor are we allowed to know the aftermath, immediate or eventual, of the novel's last scene, which balances between the awful and nothing much. The characters know that danger is of the wayward kind: "I'd be afraid to have a gun," Margaret says. "How would you stop yourself from playing with it all the time, pointing it out the window at passers-by and stuff?"

In the meantime things are organized on a principle, as Margaret observes, of "Anarchy Lite." Del works as an electronics salesman, and might or might not give it up. He does a stint as factotum for a college retreat, and might or might not get into teaching something or other (the course on rock video, baseball and Madonna is already taken). He encounters "a young person with a life stretching out in front of her like so many unrented videos," and a priest or former priest who confesses: "I don't actually pay attention; I try to figure what I'm supposed to say. Then I say that."

In a marvelous (surely deliberate) glance back to Papa, Mr. Barthelme makes his characters pay a lot of attention to food, worrying about whether the beer is Grolsch or Stelzig's Wheat, pondering a hot dog, proposing a toast at some crisis point, fixing burgers to settle things down, being unable to get through the night without Vienna sausage.

Hinduism holds that a sacred object may be tin or tinsel; it doesn't matter, the point is that it's sacred. The Brothers conveys something of that sense and is an only partly ironic paean to tack and flotsam, the tchotchkes of American enterprise.

"Why are you so worried about phony?" Bud asks at one point. "There's nothing wrong with phony stuff; it's just more stuff."

Mr. Barthelme's eloquence is hard to pin down because it is disguised as boy talk, soaring imagery undercut by two kinds of dumb. He gives us a crew of college-prof beach bums, mouthy modem innocents; and his hero, Del, stands at the wet edge of the world with an exact eye and the syntax of the mall. The effect is wonderful, simultaneously vivid and bewildering.

I once heard Carol Bly inveigh against the kind of metaphor that diminishes the natural world by comparison to manufactured things. But for Frederick Barthelme this is the real world, reconstituted, regurgitated and gorgeous. Pelicans drop like daggers into a gunmetal gray sea. A beautiful woman looks like a catalogue, a man is an enormous Q-Tip.

Del, the more spiritual of the brothers, struggles through our trashed and plastic language to express the fundamental cry of art: "It's just this breathtaking world, that's the point. It's like the story's not important—what's important is the way the world looks. That's what makes you feel the stuff."