[In the following review, Kaveney asserts that Barthelme's Tracer provides a "coherent picture of the randomness of contemporary American life."]

The sheer slimness—sheer as in nylons as well as the merely emphatic—of Frederick Barthelme's second novel [Tracer] marks a moderate advance over his already impressive Second Marriage. There is here the same seemingly arbitrary proliferation of mildly surreal incidents—a long narrative of sexual paranoia about dwarves, an aggressive hotelier with an electronic box monitoring his brain patterns, a preacher talking of the joys of self-delusion, a small child called Magic who prattles about camels—as top-dressing over the usual sexual muddle of people who have discarded morals but not basic politeness. Here, though, the brevity makes them into a coherent picture of the randomness of contemporary American life, rather than—as seemed to be the case at times in the earlier novel—a lot of good extra bits from abandoned short stories, stuck in as padding.

Like many recent American novels this one deals in a sort of charming amorality whose charm is partly that of freedom from traditional and possibly irrational guilts, partly that of intense tiredness with an existence in which taboos are forgotten rather than ever actually broken. Martin visits, in one of the less fashionable resort towns of Florida, his sister-in-law Dominica, who is trying vaguely to set up a reconciliation between him and her sister Alex before their divorce becomes final; her good intentions in no way preclude her taking him to bed.

Much of the strength of the book comes from Martin's male sense of exclusion from the shared world of the sisters; even Alex's jealous resentment is largely expressed in a private language from which he is essentially and forever excluded. Meanwhile, odd incidents seem to imply that Dominica's ex-husband is trying to pressurize her into abandoning her share of the motel she runs for him; then he turns up on a motorbike and everyone decides that he is so much nicer these days than he used to be that she must be wrong. The campaign of harassment is never traced to source, but Dominica does indeed leave the motel to work on her relationship with Alex, the reconciliation having predictably failed; Martin departs by plane in the same mood of bafflement that he arrived in; accidie and fecklessness seem more closely linked than we had imagined. Quasi-incest and cabbalistic signs in the motel car-park are ultimately not seen as more important to the characters than another motel resident's lectures about pancake-making.