I've read most of his books - Barthelme, not Gutenburg - novels and short stories I guess you would call them, though they don't follow the usual narrative conventions - and they seldom fail to surprise, provoke, and entertain. I laughed, I cried, I reflected, he shot himself.
Why I missed this one (1986) I have no idea, but there it was on the shelf at the public library, where I was looking for something by John Barth, whom I discovered about the same point in my disjointed cut-and-paste undergraduate years. Did I read a review? Did someone hand me a copy and say you gotta read this? Snow White was my first encounter with Barthelme, and it was hilariously freaking absurdly beautiful in an archetypally tragic and tubular way. Then, as now, I wished I could write like him. To wit:
Q: What did you do, after work, in the evenings or on weekend, in Philadelphia?
A: Just ordinary things.
Q: No special interests?
A: I was very interested in bow-hunting. These new bows they have now, what they call a compound bow - Also, I'm a member of the Galapagos Society, we work for the environment, it's really a very effective -
Q: And what else?
A: Well, adultery. I would say that's how I spent most of my free time. In adultery.
Q: You mean regular adultery.
A: Yes. Sleeping with people although legally bound to someone else.
Q: These were women.
A: Invariably.
.... [something about a haircutter]
A: What if she stabs me in the ear with the scissors?
Q: Unlikely, I would think.
A: Stabs me in the ear with the scissors in an excess of rage?
Q: Your guilt. I recognize it. Clearly, guilt.
A: Nonsense. The prudent man guards his eardrums. The prudent man avoid anomalous circumstances.
Q: You regard yourself as prudent.
A: I regard myself as asleep. I go along, things happen to me, there are disturbances, one copes, thinking of the golden pillow, I don't mean literally golden but golden in my esteem -
Q: Let me play this track here for you, it's by Echo and the Bunnymen -
A: I'll pass.
Q: I also have a video of the Tet offensive with Walter Cronkite...
(Donald Barthelme, Paradise, NY: Putnam, 1986, p. 47)
Sorry, that was a bit on the long side, but you get the idea. Or not. I'm not going to try to unpack it because the packaging is already so well done. I'll do what D.H. Lawrence did in his essays about Hawthorne and Melville, which was essentially to let them write it for him, which he did brilliantly of course.
Veronica told him that she had flunked Freshman English 1303 three times. "How in the world did you do that?" he asked. "Comma splices," she said. "Also every time I wrote down something I thought, the small-section teacher said that it was banal. It probably was banal." [....] "We all went through this," he told them, and Dore said, "Yeah, and you smart guys did the Vietnam war." Simon had opposed the Vietnam war in all possible ways short of self-immolation but could not deny that it was a war constructed by people who had labored through Psychology I, II, III, and IV and Main Currents of Western Thought. "But, dummy, it's the only thing you've got," he said. "Your best idea." "I have the highest respect for education," she said. "The highest. I'd be just as dreary when I came out as I was when I went in." (Paradise, p. 169)
It's like trying to explain a joke, which is always a mistake, for the same reason that Isadora Duncan told the journalist, when asked what the dance means, that if she could tell him what it means, she wouldn't have danced it. Or maybe it was Martha Graham. On the other hand, what good is a review that says, This is a good book, and you should read it? Not much. Is that enough filler between slices of fresh fruit, enough bread to clear the palate before the next sip of wine?
"One day there won't be any wives any more."
"Or husbands either."
"Just free units cruising the surface of the earth. Flying the black flag."
"Something to look forward to."
"Do you really think so?"
"What about the children?"
"Get one and keep it. Keep it for yourself. Hug it and teach it things. Everything you know."
(Paradise, p. 200)
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