SOURCE: "'80s Pastoral: Frederick Barthelme's Moon Deluxe Ten Years On," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 175-86.

[In the following essay, Peters argues that Barthelme's best contribution is his direct "confrontation of the contemporary American landscape, the terrain of retail and residential sprawl associated with shopping malls, fast food outlets, tract housing, and television."]

The suburban dreamscape through which Frederick Barthelme's characters shuffle in Moon Deluxe, his 1983 debut collection of short stories, now seems as innocent as that lost America of Nabokov's Lolita. The comparison is not altogether gratuitous: many of Barthelme's stories involve relationships between older men and young girls or much younger women. Erika Landson, the beautiful 25-year-old restaurateur of "Gila Flambé," tells the narrator that when she married the rich, middle-aged oddball Warren Pelham, she had been in love with him "since I was a kid." "Feeders" offers the creepy Cecil Putnam, at once both anxious father and discarded lover: "That's my baby girl you got upstairs." the fiftyish Putnam tells her landlord. In "Grapette," Barthelme's standard late-thirty-something narrator spends the evening with a young lady named Carmel whose parents, Margaret and Herman, have just given her a new Peugeot for her seventeenth birthday:

When she was thirteen and I was thirty-three, we had a little romance. Margaret and Merman wrote it off as a crush, but I wasn't so sure. Carmel looked twenty then; I took her to galleries and movies, and we slept together. One of Margaret's therapist friends wondered if it was such a good idea to encourage this; I told Herman that it was wearing on me, too.

Humbert Humbert's claim in Lolita that "the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws" finds ample support in the world of Barthelme's stories, though children make infrequent appearances. More often, his narrators justify the view, popular with American women, that American men are themselves just little boys. Henry Pfeister, the narrator of "Box Step," wears mismatched socks and plays repeatedly with a plastic toy dinosaur he has just purchased: at home, in the presence of his sister and of his co-worker Anne (who is also his emerging love interest), he fills the hollow toy with won ton soup and proceeds to spill it all over the table. Later, over what should be an intimate dinner, Henry presents Anne with, not a ring or a rose, but another toy dinosaur. Similarly, the voyeur-narrator of "Shopgirls," like the deviant Humbert, is childlike in his very obsessiveness, and the dreamy, hypnotic tone of the narrative owes much to Humbert's own perverse lyricism. Readers who recall the latter's clothes-shopping spree in Parkington following the death of Charlotte Haze should be able to recognize the "you" of "Shopgirls" as a literary descendant of Nabokov's nympholept:

You watch the pretty salesgirl slide a box of Halston soap onto a low shelf, watch her braid slip off her shoulder, watch like an adolescent as the vent at the neck of her blouse opens slightly—she is twenty, maybe twenty-two, tan, and greatly freckled; she wears a dark-blue V-neck blouse without a collar, and her skirt is white cotton, calf length, slit up the right side to a point just beneath her thigh. Her hair, a soft blond, is pulled straight and close to the scalp, woven at the back into a single thick strand. In the fluorescent light of the display cabinet her eye shadow shines.

Although his stories are often viewed as wry depictions of looking for love in all the wrong places, it is not the "Lolita" theme as such that I wish to pursue in Barthelme. Rather, I want to argue that the real contribution of his first and best book is its direct confrontation of the contemporary American landscape, the terrain of retail and residential sprawl associated with shopping malls, fast-food outlets, tract housing, and television. My argument takes issue with the point of view typified by John W. Aldridge's recent attack on what he calls "assembly-line-fiction," the authors of which:

seem remarkably oblivious to the realities of social context and physical milieu in general. They do not indicate in their work that they are aware of the ugliness and vapidity of the contemporary urban and suburban environment. They take no critical attitude toward it. It does not provoke them to raise qualitative questions about it—like those, for example, that Mailer, Vonnegut, Gaddis, Pynchon, and Heller have all been provoked to raise—but as is the case with their response to social issues, they appear to perceive it, if at all, as an abstraction or as an entirely neutral medium, as natural and as invisible as the air they breathe. In the K-Mart fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason and Frederick Barthelme—to take notable instances—the environment typified by the K-Mart is not evaluated as the sleazy and soul-deadening thing it is. It is treated simply as a blank space where the action occurs, as a featureless corridor through which the characters move in their unimpeded progress toward inconsequence.

What is implicit here is that only one response to this physical environment is morally possible: an attack upon it as "ugly," "sleazy and soul-deadening." Aldridge in effect faults Barthelme and Mason for not being satirists, like Don DeLillo who "quite deliberately addresses the more ludicrous and cliched features of contemporary life through comic exaggeration inflates them into prime objects of satire." He goes on to describe this environment as:

open, bland, uniform, monotonous, and at the same time smoothly functional and accommodative like that of a modern housing development or shopping mall. All one can do with either, besides living badly in it, is find it too dull and depressing to be noticed. If a person has grown up in a development and shopped his whole life in a mall—and in this country over the last thirty years a child of the middle classes could scarcely have avoided that calamity—it would not be surprising if his sensibilities were as atrophied as the optic nerves of fish spawned for centuries in caves.

For the literary righteous, the K-Mart environment is an easy target: to find it either "too depressing to be noticed" or worthy only of satire constitutes a failure of the moral imagination. It is also impractical: this environment is not going to go away, and few Americans have the wherewithal to move to or make a more aesthetically satisfying one. Perhaps the question becomes that of Robert Frost's Oven Bird: "what to make of a diminished thing."

Critics such as Aldridge and the reviewer of Moon Deluxe for Studies in Short Fiction, Peter LaSalle, reprimand the New Yorker school of fiction for drearily reproducing a name-brand existence devoid of event or principle. Such a view is inadequate to the textures of Moon Deluxe. For example, neither Aldridge nor Peter LaSalle comments on the setting for Barthelme's stories: the South—Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile. Surely, the failure of these stories to conform in any way to common expectations of Southern writing is significant, mischievously so, like Richard Ford's praise of Detroit and New Jersey in The Sportswriter. Indeed, the demographics of Moon Deluxe illustrate just how stylized these settings are: there are, for instance, more African Americans in Woody Allen films than in Barthelme's South. Nor are there Jews, Hispanics, or, for that matter, Episcopalians. He does not exclude minorities from his stories so much as exclude racial, ethnic, or religious consciousness at all. Only an occasional Chinese waiter disturbs the relentless whiteness—or rather, blankness—of his characters, even when they are named, as in the eponymous story, "The Browns." Otherwise, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and gay men are absent, though not, interestingly enough, gay women.

Nor are we ever sure what Barthelme's characters do for a living. Where Jerzy Kosinski's protagonists, like Henry James's, are conveniently rich, Barthelme's narrators have the next best thing to wealth: an office job in America, circa 1981. We rarely know, however, what the company does, or what the narrator's job title is, his salary, qualifications, college, or anything. The office gives him the freedom to come and go more or less at will without the pressing need to accomplish anything particular. Virtually our first image in the book is of Henry Pfeister's feet, in "Box Step," "balanced on the taupe Selectric II." The couple having an affair in "Trip" are both, technically, on a business trip, but Barthelme is too honest to claim the adjective even for his title. They begin their courtship by "having long and wistful and detailed telephone conversations on the company WATS line, talking about everything that they can think of, even business." The neurotic, 30-year-old "Browns" are, respectively, lawyer and architect, but the story exhibits no interest in the skills, training, or imagination required to perform these occupations, and we never learn the occupation of the narrator of "The Browns." On the other hand, Barthelme's characters are not especially worldly: the female roommates of the title story hardly know the difference between cognac and Ripple, nor do they care. Most of his narrators live in large, modern apartment—not condominium—complexes with the kind of pretentious or predictable names that recall the onomastic litanies of Lolita: Casa de Sol, Palm Shadows, Forest Royale, Santa Rosa, and The Creekside. In short, Barthelme's modestly affluent figures must not be mistaken for that infamous '80s animal the yuppie. They have none of the yuppie's careerist drive or manic materialism: they neither work hard nor play hard.

Thus, Barthelme's stories are no more realistic than Kafka's; his Gulf South as much an invention as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county. In this regard, Barthelme parts company from Aldridge's other victim, Bobbie Ann Mason, whose work expresses a painful awareness of the changing landscape of her native Kentucky: farms and fields are jostled by strip malls and condo complexes, while the Eurythmics play in the background. Barthelme eliminates that temporal and spatial perspective, and even the kind of pop culture references to which Mason clings. His landscape is not changing at all. The organizing conceit of his narrative mode is that no other world exists. His suburbs are not juxtaposed against any city: references to Dallas or Mobile or Biloxi serve only to identify a geographic base. We never set foot inside these places. Likewise, farms, fields, and forests make rare appearances. The conceit is, in effect, that the entire country looks like this. It is the sly bravery of that conceit I wish to emphasize, a bravery in treating the one subject, the contemporary American landscape, that postmodern American fiction has largely failed to deal with in any way except that licensed by Aldridge—satirically. And it is here, especially, that the model of Nabokov becomes relevant.

Reading Lolita today, we find that time has only deepened the richness of the parallel its author engineers between Dolores Haze and America, that "lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country," which Humbert admits he only "defiled with a sinuous trail of slime." Nabokov's affectionate if unsentimental picture of postwar American popular and roadside tourist culture affects us today in ways that the reader in 1957 could not have been, in ways that Nabokov himself could not have anticipated. Four decades later, that America can only appear eerily Arcadian. The inventory of ordinary pleasures denied Lolita constitutes a portrait of middle-class American childhood, circa 1948. Subsumed into Humbert's larger account of Truman-era American life, the total picture appears positively quaint to 1990s readers who can forget that their narrator is a child molester. If we itemize what is missing from Lolita's world, we might understand this phenomenon: television, for one thing: as for the world outside, though the endless Komfy Kabins, Pine Manor motels, and dairy bars through which Humbert and his charge pass are meant to embody the vulgar retail landscape of middle-class life, we can only envy the absence of the commercial and cultural uniformity that characterizes our own landscape. There are no Pizza Huts in Nabokov, no McDonalds, no Holiday Inns, no Radio Shacks, no CVSs, no Wai-Marts choking off commerce on Ramsdale's main street, no factory outlets, and no shopping malls. The business establishments in Lolita are independently, if not imaginatively, named, owned, and operated: its Wace, Colorado can support four drugstore cum soda-fountains. Humbert's Parkington shopping spree (see epigraph) would be impossible now in most of the small cities and towns of the US. From Humbert the alien—artist, madman, European—the temples and tenor of middle-class American life elicit an amused if disdainful fascination. His America, unlike his nymphet, is unchanging: his satire takes for granted an American social and physical environment that we spend millions of tax dollars trying to recreate. The poignant thing about the book now is that we are as much aliens in Lolita's America as was the maniacal Humbert.

Such a gap has already opened up between the reader and the America of Moon Deluxe. Again, we need only itemize what is missing from his apartment complex pastoral: crime, AIDS, racism, homelessness, drugs; liquor and cigarettes are almost equally rare, as is rock music, or music of any kind, for that matter. Personal computers, microwaves, and portable phones are starting to turn up, but there is hardly any awareness of the outside world at all—no sense of domestic, environmental, or international crisis. Barthelme has Nabokov's trick of making solipsism seem innocent. The three young engineers from Michigan in "Grapette" can drive, without self-consciousness, new Toyota Celicas, which they keep in pristine condition. In effect, Barthelme's stories depict the period in which the United States was losing its economic primacy to Japan and Germany but before it had realized it was doing so. It is here, if anywhere, that Barthelme's stories possess an implicit satirical thrust. Otherwise, his world seems utterly a-historical. We are never encouraged, as we are with Ann Beattie's, for example, to associate Barthelme's characters with the sixties. We never think of his narrators as former campus activists or ex-hippies, even though, by their ages, they are of just that generation. He even avoids offering details of hair length or dress that might evoke a more specific period. in this sense, Barthelme's world is more like Harold Pinter's than Ann Beattie's or Bobbie Ann Mason's: in his work the 1960s seems as far away as the 1860s.

At the same time, there is something heroic about Barthelme's refusal—and the refusal of his characters—to look back, to be nostalgic, or even to scheme for a more aesthetically or materially rewarding future. No character in Moon Deluxe longs for that restored Victorian or eighteenth-century carriage-house of the yuppie's imaginings; none of them are killing time until they can move to the country. They do not even acknowledge the possibility. Normally, this should suggest a profound deficiency of imagination or moral energy. Even Russell Banks, in defending Barthelme against Aldridge's book, refers to Barthelme's narrators as almost always "unreliable," and compares his characters to William Burroughs's junkies, "drugged by consumerism."

Put simply, either Moon Deluxe's characters are moral deadbeats or Barthelme is. But there is another possibility: Barthelme requires us, if I may cite Nabokov once more, "to learn to discern the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey." Certainly Ann in "Box Step" tries:

After the movie we stop outside the theatre to look at the coming-attraction posters. It's just beginning to get dark, and the street lights are lime against the pale sky. The store signs have come on, blinking in oranges and blues and bright whites; along Snap Street the cars have amber and red running lights. The parking lot has fresh yellow lines on new blacktop, and off to the right clear bulbs dangle on black wires over Portofino's Fine Used Cars.

"Pretty," she says, looping her arm through mine and pulling us off the curb toward her car.

Aldridge faults the authors of "assembly-line-fiction" for possessing "apparently no sense that they belong to a literary tradition that might prove nourishing," but Barthelme is, I would argue, essentially working in a mode, if not a genre, that goes back to the eighteenth century: that of the urban, or town, eclogue, and its cousin the mock-pastoral. The narrator of "The Browns" mentions, for example, "the kind of movie Hollywood started making in numbers about five or six years ago, in which ordinary life is made fun of and made mysterious and beautiful at the same time." If a bit glib, the formulation could apply as easily to Pope's Dunciad or Swift's "Description of a City Shower" as to "Moon Deluxe" or "Shopgirls." Like Richard Ford, with his rhapsodies on New Jersey in The Sportswriter, Barthelme refuses to be embarrassed by the social environment in which he places his characters. This is, I would suggest, the moral center of his work. By living as if there were no other landscape, his characters repudiate the deadening civic nostalgia that so plagues the US with the ersatz, as in Quincy Market in Boston, or Beale Street in Memphis, where even the police station has its own museum attached. All the historic districts, hardwood floors, and fake gas lamps in the world will not bring back what we have given up: Barthelme's characters know that so well they have internalized it. It is we who, like the son Julian in O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," still long for a lost gentility we shall never recover.

This is not say that Moon Deluxe is some kind of cyberpunk celebration of shopping malls and concrete. Barthelme's acceptance of the contemporary landscape is as much a stylistic device as an end in itself, but it is a device by which he transforms the ordinary into the dreamlike: for his protagonists, ordinary life still possesses a mystery and a promise, even if it is a mystery they are in no hurry to have solved; and they are not driven by their hormones. Their very diffidence implies an openness, even generosity of spirit. The narrating "you" of "Shopgirls" does not really want to meet the objects of his careful watch: when teased with the idea that it would have been "a dream come true" had one of the shopgirls introduced herself to him earlier, he is decidedly unenthusiastic: "I don't know. Not exactly—maybe."

This openness accounts for the voyeurism motif in Barthelme's stories. In the title piece, for example, the narrator Edward has an awkward encounter with two young women, roommates, one a lively blonde, the other a stunning femme fatale. Elements of dialogue and of setting particularly—lush foliage and winding paths amid a modern apartment complex—produce a mysteriousness about the two women. Lily and Antonia, that defies us to apply to them the labels "lesbian" or "bisexual" even after the relevance of those terms is made clear. Upon leaving the couple, Edward muses, "You wonder what it would be like if they invited you to stay the night, to sleep on the splendid yellow couch, to have a hurried breakfast with them before work, to be part of their routine." Likewise, the narrator of "Exotic Nile," seeing a strip of brick houses off a highway, "wondered how it would feel to live out there, with the highway and the big electrical towers." The 16-year-old Violet, a waitress at "Pie Country," claims to be a runaway when she shows up at the door of one of her regular customers, in effect, going undercover in order to meet him: "'You probably wouldn't know me out of uniform,' she says." The fantasies here are not sexual but rather of participation, of contact with another daily reality. In this regard, Barthelme anticipates the wistful daydreaming of Richard Ford's sports-writer, Frank Bascombe, who hopes for an easy intimacy with his prospective father-in-law, "even if Vicki and I didn't work things out": "If his tire went flat some rainy night in Haddam or Hightstown or any place within my area code, he could call me up. I'd drive out to get him … he would go off into the Jersey darkness certain he had a friend worthy of his trust." Here and elsewhere, Ford's Frank Bascombe fantasizes about being, in effect, a regular guy. In Barthelme, sometimes even the talk is about voyeurism, as in this discussion from "Pool Lights" between a young woman named Dolores Prince and the story's narrator. Even here, the sexual connotations of "watching" take second place to sheer curiosity about other people:

"I imagine all these people looking out their windows at me. It makes me nervous."

"Oh you can't think about that," Dolores says. She scans the buildings surrounding the pool. "If they look, they look—who gets hurt?" She says this with a coy smile, as if she suspects you watch poolside parties from the apartment window. She wipes more lotion on her thighs. "Some Saturday afternoons in summer the sunbathers are irresistible, I guess, especially through a slit in the curtains…. I like watching them talk to each other. The way they move around gesturing, making faces—it's interesting."

"I know what you mean. And the women aren't bad either."

Ultimately, Barthelme leaves us uncertain about the fate of his characters and uncertain too, perhaps, about the durability of the delicate tones and narrative methods that sustain his '80s pastoral. His work since Moon Deluxe, in the short story and in novels, has been inconsistent, while signaling continuing fascinations. Children become increasingly prominent, though Barthelme and his narrators, like many Americans, have trouble balancing the demands of children and marriage, so much so, in fact, that one of his best novels organizes itself by dividing its attention neatly between the narrator's son and his wife. The title of this novel, Natural Selection, hints at an increasingly elegiac, even desperate strain. Its ending, a harrowing catastrophe on the highway, contains two things absent from Moon Deluxe: violence and death. That novel and its title might remind us that suggestions of the fragility of life occasionally do surface in the earlier work. The dinosaur of "Box Step" alludes to a possibility of extinction that Natural Selection only confirms. Indeed, Moon Deluxe contains several references to extinct, endangered, or exotic animals: the dying aquarians of "Fish," a wolf in the title story, the reptiles of "Gila Flambé." On a more domestic front, the fight between neighboring dogs that inaugurates "The Browns" catches the reader by surprise, not only by the reference to fighting, but by the very presence of the dogs themselves, emblematic of a daily world of biology and animality that is itself largely missing from Moon Deluxe. With rare exceptions, not only are there no children in these stories, there are no parents. Perhaps the most endangered species in Moon Deluxe is its single, childless, male narrator. Henry Pfeister in "Box Step" confesses to Ann that he feels "nervous … all the time. I don't know why." Later she dances the box step not with Henry but with his toy dinosaur. A photograph in Lily and Antonia's apartment in "Moon Deluxe" "shows a man with a black fedora and cane rolled up in a rug in a small room whose only other occupant is a wolf." In both this story and in "Monster Deal"—surely, a conscious reworking of the former—the narrator loses out in the competition for a sexual mate to, not a male rival, but a woman. Barthelme's bachelor is frequently confronted with a feminine vitality that overawes him, a vitality invariably signaled by great height. The 16-year-old Violet who shows up mysteriously at the narrator's door is six-feet tall, we're told; later, the two of them encounter a slow-witted if gentle giant, the seven-foot-four Sidney, who seeks only the pleasure of driving the narrator's Rabbit. Antonia, a man-eater of sorts ("So many men, so little time," her T-shirt reads) is "Huge, extraordinary, easily over six feet." Another narrator describes his unexpected guest Tina as "a monster … Six feet if she's an inch." Barthelme allows the exotic vitality of his women characters to highlight the limitations of his male protagonists. In a scene near the end of "Grapette," its male narrator loses contact with the earth altogether as he levitates on a La-Z-Boy recliner, "pushing back until I'm horizontal, floating in the middle of the living room." The scene concludes "Grapette," in fact, with one of the few hints of longing and regret in the whole of Moon Deluxe. Having returned from a ride in her new car, and spurning an invitation from the party-animal engineers, the narrator catches the curiosity of Carmel when he mentions the eponymous beverage, now, alas, long extinct:

"What is it?"

"The end of the world as we have known it."

"Oh."

"Little purple bottles, six ounces." I wave my hand and twist my head to one side so I can see her on the couch. "Grapette kind of went away, I guess. I hate that."

She's still for a minute, then squirms up on the sofa and pulls the white cushion into her lap turning to face me. "Are you sure? Maybe we ought to go find some, maybe it's still out there."

It is, significantly, the ex-nymphet Carmel and not the narrator who voices that hope, as if the soft drink's childish name suddenly evokes for her an innocence she let go of too soon. But the slightly apocalyptic note here is not the collection's last word. Although its title suggests yet another of the deferred or defused encounters so common in Moon Deluxe, the final story, "Rain Check," leaves us with Barthelme's narrator nearing 40, bloodied but unbowed, walking his date (almost half his age) to her door "just the way I've been walking women to their doors for better than twenty years." The narrator might well be bloodied, since his uncomfortable dinner with Lucille is followed by an accident on the road: their car collides with an ASPCA truck. The closing paragraph of the story suggests that there may be hope yet for Barthelme's bachelors; and for readers who remember their Swift, the scene may also justify my allusion earlier to his "Description of a City Shower":

Then, with the garbage men going up and down the street singing some kind of lilting reggae tune, and the cans clanking around and rolling in the gutter when they're thrown from the truck back toward where they were picked up, Lucille says haltingly, "So. What about a shower?" 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. It's nearly five o'clock and the light out is delicate and pink. The garbage song dies off up the block, and half a dozen fatigued-looking kids in matching jackets pull up in a green Dodge and pile into the street, making catcalls and whistling and pointing at us. 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 fingertips inside my shirt cuff, pinching my skin with her nails.