[In the following excerpt, Coley discusses how Barthelme's Two against One departs from his previous work.]

Frederick Barthelme's usual setup—Gulf Coast, passive white male protagonist recently uncoupled from his better half—needs no introduction. But Two against One is a departure. While the elements are the same, Barthelme has traded in the polished, elliptical play of surfaces that made his reputation. The new look? Long paragraphs of analysis and exposition. In Two against One he has pushed himself to go inside his characters at whatever the cost, and the cost is high.

Time was, heroic writers worked their way into the depths to find images of mythic power. Barthelme comes around the final bend to discover a big neon VACANCY sign blinking on and off. Here's Elise, estranged wife of the passive white male protagonist (PWMP), describing Edward, the PWMP, to himself—and they aren't having a fight, the emotional tone is cool—"I mean, you're a nice guy, and all that, you're an interesting problem, but you're not exactly man of the year. You're a little bit anal, right? And you're not a big romantic. I mean, you give new meaning to the concept of room temperature." That 'little bit anal' is what they used to call litotes. Roscoe, a man Elise wants to be the third leg in a semiplatonic threesome with Edward, makes Edward look like Steerforth. The women are Barthelme's usual quirky, fey types and are the agents who move the story. They're cute but lightweight.

I admire his guts. Before hitting forty-five, Barthelme was successful in both senses of the term: he was getting over, and he was producing distinctive, well-made fiction that worked a significant vein of contemporary experience. Here he tries to move beyond what he has done and achieve something more difficult. Merely to present those important phenomena the empty personality and the make-bit-up-as-you-go-along relationship is one thing; to wrestle with them, confront them in fiction, is another.

In a bitter outburst Edward asks if he should feel inadequate because he doesn't "bust some guy's ass in a business deal, then take a whiskey into the yard and have deep thoughts about America?" Rather, what he likes is "to walk from one room to another, mess around in that room for a while, walk back to the room I came out of, rest a while, then walk into a third room and get a Nestle's Crunch ice cream bar and sit down on the couch for a minute, then go in the bathroom and wash my face, then read a magazine—Consumer Reports is good…." Ouch.

Now Barthelme doesn't really think that's all there is to Edward. In the lengthy monologues and dialogues about Edward, Elise, why they split up, why they only made love three times in their final year together, what they should do now, Edward reveals a frozen soul. But that takes us into the land of pop psychology, of how-you-say low self-esteem, blocked anger. That territory has been pretty well picked over. Not much left for the writer there.

Many readers find relationships fascinating—a magazine of that name probably exists already—but for the life of me I can't see what difference it makes whether Edward and Elise get back together or not. Nothing is at stake: no children, no property, no common cause. Where I live hardly a week goes by that a man doesn't shoot his estranged wife and often himself as well. The failure of those relationships made a difference. Edward and Elise will just drift on down the river of time either way—a problem they themselves are aware of.

As is Barthelme. In the November 3, 1988 New York Times Book Review he had a lucid, important essay called "On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Beans." It explains where he's coming from. It says things like "Events are witnessed, not experienced." Or "People don't froth as much in life as they do in realist fiction." In a brilliant bit of sarcasm it argues that the current incarnation of something like War and Peace is CNN.

Well, I dunno. You see his point. I just read Madison Smartt Bell's Soldier's Joy, which wants to merge with history, and for all its good prose, good intentions, its heart seems synthetic—a bionic book.

And yet, failure to feel history on the nerve ends is one reason folks who go from suburbs to writing programs to teaching jobs will not write like William Burroughs, Nadine Gordimer, or Toni Morrison. Reading Barthelme's essay I thought of Gyorgy Lukács, who says somewhere that yes, Balzac is melodramatic but history is melodramatic. Barthelme grew up in Texas. When he was twenty, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby made the headlines and a governor of Texas was shot most melodramatically. Maybe history is too tough to compete with. What novelist could invent a character as rich, sad, strange, and central to the century as Lee Harvey Oswald?…