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Frederick Barthelme's short stories began appearing in The New Yorker in 1981 when he was thirty-eight—he was born in 1943 in Houston, Texas. A collection of these stories, Moon Deluxe, was published in 1983. This was followed by two novels—Second Marriage (1984) and Tracer (1985) and another collection in 1987, Chroma. The novels Two Against One in 1988 and Natural Selection in 1989 rounded out the decade. In the 1990s, as for books, he only published novels along with a nonfiction work written with his brother, Steven—a memoir about gambling. (Another brother was the famed postmodernist novelist and short story writer Donald.)
 His early work in the short story was perhaps most impactful, as it offered us a new way of seeing things, changing our ideas about form and structure and content. Barthelme was part of a group of writers that were briefly but immensely influential during the early 1980s and this included Mary Robison (especially An Amateur's Guide to the Night in 1983), Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live in 1985), Jayne Anne Phillips (Black Tickets in 1979), Bobbie Ann Mason (Shiloh and Other Stories in 1982), and of course the Gordon Lish edited stories of Raymond Carver, which started it all: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), as well as the stories Carver reconstructed in Cathedral (1983) and this was all presaged by Ann Beattie whose short stories from The New Yorker in the 1970s are often cited as the beginning of this movement, though her early style, like Carver's, changed radically over her career, as did those of most of these writers.
In the mid-to-late 1970s and throughout the 1980s minimalism became a dominant movement in burgeoning literary circles, especially among college students, who either became enamored by these stories because of their brevity or maybe because they thought they could so easily emulate these masters—they found out it wasn't very easy at all. Raymond Carver became the most popular practitioner of this minimalist style with the stripped-down approach of his early stories—some of them edited against his will by his editor Lish, who sometimes helped Carver, and maybe sometimes didn't.
When Moon Deluxe appeared, I was a sophomore at Bennington College in Vermont and the work seemed unworldly—a radical departure, a confirmation of something that was in the air, and as with Ann Beattie's early stories and Carver's, the collection asked: what is a short story? Reading Moon Deluxe didn't remind me at all of The Stories of John Cheever, a massive and massively popular collection that appeared in 1978 and sold a gazillion copies—everyone seemed to have it and it won not only The National Book Award but also the Pulitzer Prize—and this giant tome with its famous orange cover, almost 700 pages long, was a reminder of Cheever's genius, dotted with at least half a dozen of what were considered some of the greatest American stories of the twentieth century. Cheever was from a different world and a believer in something that the minimalists—emerging from the haze of Vietnam, the end of the '60s, Watergate, the Bicentennial, a recession, punk rock—did not. Cheever was rooted in an American tradition that has never fully left the landscape. George Saunders, probably the most widely read living American short story writer, is much closer to Cheever than he is to Barthelme or any of the minimalists despite his postmodern flourishes.
Moon Deluxe reminded me of the jolt I felt about seven years earlier when I read Hemingway's first collection In Our Time (I hadn't wanted to—it was a class assignment at my prep school) and realized while reading it that writing was about style, about consciousness, and not just plot, a clever story, "interesting" characters, drama connected to an obvious epiphany with a "beautiful" sentence tying everything up where the reader says "Oh yes, this is the world I know, yes, I recognize this" and is somewhat reassured that their outlook and experience has been confirmed. Hemingway shook that notion up—and though his stories did have plot and movement, interesting characters, were clever, and contained drama, it was the way they were being told that shocked me: a style so stripped-down that the sentences seemed practically biblical in their cadences. The realization that a story could be told in this manner—what was left out was as important as what was left in—a kind of existential ambiguity—was a flash of lightning in my consciousness, forever altering the way I read fiction and the way I located style as the primary—if not the only—meaning of a work. Every story has been told but the way a story can be told has not. This is called having a voice.
Moon Deluxe wasn't as stripped down as Hemingway or those first two Carver books—which were arguably as influential to a generation of young American writers as The Velvet Underground or The Sex Pistols were to young musicians—but we could locate a similar signal. (Later, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son in 1992 would add a new but connected sound to this signal and become almost as much of a touchstone as Carver's collected work.) The stories in Moon Deluxe were fuller and more detailed—entrancing to some of us, bewildering to those expecting a throughline from what was now seen as the classicism of Hemingway (and Fitzgerald and Faulkner) to the classicism of John Cheever. The minimalists, like Barthelme (whether he wants to be labeled that or not), unlike the punks, weren't a rebuke to Cheever's craftsmanship and talent, his "professionalism," but simply a different way of approaching the short story, redefining what it could be, taking it out of what some might have felt were the now moldy environs of the "classic" New Yorker short story and morphing it into something else. And it was The New Yorker that was the key hub where almost all of these new writers were being published— the magazine had heard the signal too: that things were changing, and because of a generation's particular experience, the writers were looking at the world in new ways. Ann Beattie was the precursor of this: creating an alienated sense of drift in the short stories she published in the magazine in the mid-1970s that were unlike anything else in that moment.
A microscopic attention to mundane detail, a fleeting style, characters ungrounded and unmoored, a narrative that wasn't obvious, a story that never announced itself, things just happened, there was no obvious epiphany—if there was an epiphany you had to find it. These were not stories that moved from A to B to C to D. These were often stories, as Barthelme has said, that began at C then moved to F then back to E and then to M and to K and then to A. Many of these stories were sometimes told in second person present ("You drive the Buick to the 7-Eleven and then walk in where you buy a bag of Cheeto's and the clerk says hello to you"—a made-up example) which is something Jay McInerney would use in his iconic novel of that period, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), by far the most popular work of minimalism from the early '80s, even though McInerney moved toward a grander, more all-encompassing approach, from the shadow of Raymond Carver toward the romanticism of Fitzgerald.
Barthelme's stories as well as his two novels from that period, especially Tracer, felt new—the "style" offered a mystery that made you question: what is a short story. What you've been taught a short story should be—this wasn't it, but this is a short story, too. We were dropped into the middle of something, details accumulated, seemingly random, but you also sensed not so randomly. On the surface these stories were usually shorter than what we may have been used to but also had a pleasing simplicity—the minimalists were very easy to read—just snapshots of a moment in a life, present tense, now, filled with brand names and given a cinematic sheen mostly notable because there was a new lack of interiority to so many of these stories which again made them mysteriously beguiling. Made up of only imagery and dialogue the stories felt closer to screenwriting than prose but the writing was so suggestive, so casual-seeming but not, that whenever you started thinking this the thought evaporated.
The stories in Moon Deluxe and Chroma acquired a hypnotic quality as you kept reading, wondering: where are we heading? But they were told simply, without the purposeful obfuscation of post- modernism—these were recognizable characters in a recognizable America trailed aimlessly by a miniaturist highlighting the banality of their lives: the erasure of obvious drama, the erasure of purpose, the conversations wheeling to nowhere, the story looping in on itself—becoming lightly absurdist with flashes of lyricism: a movie theater marquee, sodium lights in a parking lot, the color of the sky at sunset, swimming pools. Reading Moon Deluxe and Chroma you felt a statement was being made, an attempt to connect the reader certain style that conveyed the monotony but wasn't monotonous itself: a kind of literary trick that unearthed the mystery beneath the banality—that rescued the stories and these lives—from actual banality. Everything was mildly amusing but never laugh-out-loud funny—Barthelme was too chilled-out for that. The randomness of the stories was contained within an assured stylistic voice—these stories were obviously written. But that C to F to M to E approach eliminated all the throat clearing and exposition that came with more classical attempts at the form—and this was welcomed. Barthelme just dropped us into a situation and allowed the reader to figure who these people are and why they—and we—were here; there was no editorializing, there was no judgement. They weren't manipulative and Barthelme never told you how to feel.
Barthelme's stories were always narrated by, or from the third person POV, of white resolutely heterosexual middle-aged men— invisible not apathetic but with no clear goal—having inconsequential conversations with characters that were barely more than just names. For the most part the stories ran together undifferentiated creating an unbroken mosaic—they were about mood and an abstracted sense of place, despite the specificity of brand names— and yet the lack of interiority and description gave the stories a strange kind of timelessness that they might not have had if a more traditional approach had been taken—the stories wouldn't have worked; their DNA was elsewhere. The stories were about men and always elusive women—potential love interests with the promise of sex but often platonic—sometimes from afar in a chain restaurant or a Safeway supermarket—one of Barthelme's most famous stories from the early '80s where he dares to present as many brand names as possible (Oreos, Sara Lee, Tab, Pepperidge Farm)—or in close proximation in one of an endless series of modern apartment complexes (every character lives in an anonymous condo) along coastal towns and suburbs in the new American South.
The passivity of the men and the presentation of how they watch—and react or don't—to women was the core of most of the stories, with a mid-life sadness misted over everything. Nothing felt pre-planned and you had no idea where a story was heading. They ended abruptly—the only closure being a series of words that formed a sentence or a line of dialogue—which activated the reader into reconsidering what they just read. Barthelme went way beyond ambiguity into a state of almost punk refusal to "explain" anything, to give it an obvious meaning: this exclusion of emotional detail and interiority was purposeful. He presented what seemed like an airless, impossible world and then we were stunned as we kept reading by the actual reality of it. Barthelme's purpose, unlike his older brother Donald, was not satirical—the style was too strenuously neutral; what Barthelme refers to as "small ball," the "close focus," the "ordinary life." But how do you capture the mundanity of ordinary life—all the little moments of inconsequentiality—without becoming mundane and inconsequential? The stories suggested and replicated the randomness of this life but in a very specific style and Barthelme argued: this is a valid way of seeing the world. And this was the alchemy that Barthelme ultimately achieved—the transformation. Even when you were aware that nothing was really going on you weren't distracted by that because that was the meaning—well, it was and it wasn't—and you found yourself floating along with Barthelme's style, where a story suddenly ended with the words "your black Mazda" and you heard, or didn't hear, a sonic boom. There was also a gentleness to these stories that bordered on whimsy but never tripped into it—the style was too hard-edged, angular, clean. Barthelme became more expansive as he aged and the stories grew more complicated, more expressive, crankier, and we read more about a character's thoughts and how he feels—always a male Barthelme's age. And no matter where a story landed—how lost or negated someone felt—Barthelme was never a downer because at heart he was almost always a hidden optimist.
Now, almost four decades after Moon Deluxe and Chroma were published, it was a powerful experience rereading this career-spanning collection—these stories that seemed so new and mysterious to us when they first started appearing and that different voice announced itself sending out signals we responded to—it all came back. And though I felt older, different, reshaped, I can remember with a lasting clarity, flashes of Barthelme's influence on both The Informers, a collection of short stories I wrote during 1982-1986 while a student at Bennington, as well as my first novel Less Than Zero from 1985.
The only light in the room is from outside, a mercury vapor
street lamp that leaves the shadow of the Levolors stretched
along one wall, broken by a gladiola on the pedestal where
we always put outgoing mail. The shadow has a flicker to it.
Reading so many sentences like this, decades later, is the haunting reminder why.
Bret Easton Ellis
October 2024
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