Frederick BarthelmeBesprekingen

I enjoyed this book, but didn't finish it. It passed my thirty-pages-and-still-interesting test, but about page 66 I decided to read the last chapter and skim around to find out how some of the many plotlines and sub-plots came out. That is a satisfying way to read some novels, novels that are full of good stories, where some of these little stories come to a conclusion and some don't. The stories are interesting, the offhand comments on life are interesting, but not so interesting that I wanted to hear every one.
It is about a fifty-something retiree, Wallace Webster, who likes to talk about his past, his neighbors, and about current events. He tells stories well. They are mostly interesting, and they mostly make him look good. Things happen to Wallace and to his neighbors, and to the women in his life, past and present. Many of the characters tell stories too, usually inside one of Wallace's stories, and most of the characters survive through the end of the book.

This book won't be for everyone. As other readers have pointed out, nothing happens. And then, just in case you miss the point, the characters have another coffee, or a scotch, take a walk around the block, reminisce about some long-closed restaurant, arrive back at their front door and then ... yep, still nothing happened.

This is as little unfair, although almost as much fun to write as it was to read Barthelme's beautifully crafted "conversations about nothing." On the surface, a LOT happens: the death toll begins to creep up toward double digits (if you count the confessions of historical incidents), the central character Wallace Webster returns home, often as not, to find neighbors' houses surrounded by police cars, lights flashing, and incident tape festooning their neatly cut lawns. The alpha-male and female members of a Home Owners' Association indulge in local politics (and what could be more bloodthirsty than that?) However, what happens doesn't seem to add up to much more than the stuff of everyday life.

Which, of course, is the whole point. So, one that is not for everyone. But I find that those small accumulations of "nothing" have lingered in my mind, since I finished the book a few days ago. And my assessment has crept up, too, half-star by half star, as I slowly realized that this is a book that I will come back to.

I do have one quibble: Wallace doesn't seem to me like a man in his mid-50s, forced into early retirement. His attitudes -- to pop-culture, to technology, to life in general -- all added up to someone much older. My father retired to Florida in his 80s, and his day to day routine of coffee, or a scotch, with friends, walks around the block, reminisces about long-closed restaurants, and light flirtations with neighboring widow-ladies, all seemed much more like Wallace than a man in his 50s. This grated, a little, but it was the only "off" note in an otherwise very enjoyable novel.

This oddity consists of a photograph on the recto with a caption of a sort facing which suggests snippets from a fiction of some sort, written by a prominent novelist. The photographs concern themselves with the banal in rural America, perhaps exclusively the South, as the few localities namechecked are all southern. As is often the case with photography which chronicles the banal, some of these are very droll, others moving, but quite a few are simply banal. I never got too interested in the narrative, such as it was, in the captions. The book is a worthwhile browse, but is terribly overpriced if new.½

Diffident men play the mating game in suburban America. 17 short stories by Frederick Barthelme published in 1983. Barthelme was editor of the Mississippi review for 35 years and his stories are well written with detail and atmosphere that conjure up life in residential suburbs. People meet, interact amidst a landscape of plasticity, so concerned with consumerism that they hardly see anything else. Soulless, emotionally void the male characters deal with chance meetings against a backdrop of boredom and loneliness. No dramas, but a fascinating look at the lives of a series of men seen through their own eyes as many of the stories are written in the first or second person.

Shopgirls the second story in the collection gives a flavour of the stories that are to follow; written in the second person a good looking man becomes obsessed by one of the female sales people in a department store. After some chiding by some other sales ladies in the store you are invited back to Andreas flat and you eat together and tell each other a little about your past life, however you notice a slight imperfection in Andreas make-up and suddenly she looks wrong to you, you do not want to hurt her feelings and so you stay until midnight. This is how the story ends:

"When she decides to go to bed you make no move to follow her into the bedroom, and she makes no special invitation. You sleep on the sofa, fully dressed without even a sheet to cover you. You imagine yourself leaving the apartment on a sunny day in the middle of the week. Three beautiful women in tiny white bikinis lift their sunglasses as you pass them in the courtyard. They smile at you. You drive to the mall in a new car and spend two hours in Housewares on the second floor. You do not remember ever having been on the second floor before. Kitchen equipment is exquisite, you believe. You buy a wood handled spatula from a lovely girl with clean short hair."

Sex and consumerism, but when the going gets tough the men and the women go shopping. All the stories are written from the male perspective, but in the majority of them the women are in control if control is the right word, it is more like a careless insouciance an insouciance about their own sexuality. The men are attracted, but in most cases ultimately repelled. The stories are too short to go into motives of these people many of whom one thinks would be hard pressed to communicate reasons for their actions and some of the stories appear as mere curios, but there is usually an atmosphere of uncertainty of irresolution that is intriguing. I enjoyed reading these stories with their flavour of suburban life in the 1980's 3.5 stars and it goes back on the bookshelf.½

The language is simple, everyday language you and I use. The characters seem real, all the stupidity and events that mold their lives can be mistaken for ours.

True story about 2 brothers, college professors and writers, who inherit their parents money and begin a 2 year gambling addiction until they are charged with cheating. Eventually all charges dismissed. This information is given by the brothers at the beginning of the book. Easy to read.

Natural Selection, Frederick Barthelme's brilliant fourth novel, is the story about a man faced with a crisis that is either personal or existential/political. Peter Wexler is frustrated by his job but just as much by politics or what passes for politics on cable news, which had just been invented (or spawned) in the early 1990s when this book was written. This isn't all. Cable News and the idiots on Crossfire are the symptom or rather symbol of the larger disease: "Just look around, anywhere, any direction, somebody's lying."

In his day, Frederick Barthelme, the younger, far less famous brother of Donald, was referred to as a K-Mart Realist. I guess it is because he wrote books set in the immediate present in which they written, had Cassevettes-like plots and was not adverse to name-checking popular brands, movies, and fashions of the day.

Here is a taste from the second to last chapter:

"Lily was out of bed, hopping around pulling on her pants. 'I'm going,' she said. 'Are you coming? I'm going to show you
stuff you've never seen before. We're going to burn this town. I've got an all-night fish market in my head, a train
station, a lonely street in the rambunctious district, I've got high high wires and signing rivers and the long dark
shadows that ride in lime-colored light. I'm going to show you stuff, scorching crazy stuff, ore ships on fire at the
edge of Orion--'

'Attack,' I said. 'In the movie they were attack ships.'

Here is another taste, one that almost --taken out of context as I have unfairly presented it-- could be mistaken for self-parody. (This is the worst example I could find.):

"Ray groaned and rubbed his stomach. 'God, I was crazy then. I must've been nuts. She was killing me about
something or other, and then did the dinner thing, you know--' he did a mincing imitation of Judy that made
her look like a bad TV homosexual. 'Like what did I want for dinner right in the middle of this huge brawl
we were having, and I said I wanted Malomars and went out to the store and bought about twenty packages
and bought 'em back and dumped 'em all out on the table and sat there eating all night while she punched
around on a salad with a tiny fork. Next day she told me I had the stink of the Malomar about me.'"

K-Mart Realism, of course, was a term created by other writers and readers to disparage certain writers. Those doing the disparaging were writing literary books, or books they saw as literary, about circuses, jewish mobsters, political machines in mid-sizeed American cities. What was their beef with the K-Mart Realists? I guess, was that they saw the K-Mart Realists, who were writing about people living in the suburbs and exurbs and floundering through relationships and careers, as monopolizing the literary journals and magazines.

Welcome to consumer heaven

There Must Be Some Mistake: A Novel by Frederick Barthelme (Little, Brown and Company, $25).

Wallace Webster has been given an early retirement, and it’s left him at loose ends. He sleeps too much and drives around wasting gas when he’s not hanging out with women—his daughter, his exes, general women friends.While he’s frustrated and bored, he’s pretty normal.

Then, his neighbors start dying.

This murder mystery is the skeleton on which Frederick Barthelme hangs the flesh of his latest novel, There Must Be Some Mistake; the meaty part is all about the meaning of life and facing our mortality in the consumer’s heaven we call suburbia. But instead of taking a dismal view of life—though he does have some rather funny hits on pop culture—Barthelme’s protagonist is rather upbeat, with an attitude that is willing to take on whatever shows up next. It’s odd to call something set in this sunny, suburban world noir, but if Wallace were a bit more grizzled and pessimistic, that’s exactly what this would be.

With smart people saying smart and funny things—and a thoroughly post-modern ambiguous ending—There Must Be Some Mistake is an insightful slice of contemporary Americana.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com

Boring book that never went anywhere, also did not care about any of the characters in the book. It was well written though.

A somewhat repetitive memoir about losing 250K and not knowing why. I would have given it 3 stars except for the very poor structure of the book. When the brothers are kicked out of their usual casino, charged with violating state gambling laws, and begin a bizarre journey through the legal system, the book picks up interest. Then suddenly there's a flashback to the time of their father's death (the book is riddled with flashbacks, as if their parents, or possibly grief, could be responsible for the authors' stupidity -- but they explicitly deny that possiblilty) and the book ends without revealing what became of the court case. Hello? When I want to know the ending of the book, it's highly frustrating to have to search for it on the dust jacket. It seems that in this case the jacket blurb department was better at writing than the authors and better at editing than the editors. The dust jacket gets 3 stars.½

Painted Desert, Frederick Barthelme's sixth novel and a pseudo-sequel to his acclaimed The Brothers, offers a thoughtful road trip through the psyche of America. Barthelme has plugged in to the currents of frustration that run through us all these days and provided us with some much-needed grounding. It's a book of immediacy that takes its subject matter from today's headlines and breaking reports.

Full review: http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/reviews/barthelme.cfm