One of the familiar knocks on the short story master Donald Barthelme is that his fiction is all artifice – that, to quote Saul Bellow, it “lack[s] an inner life.” Well, Lorrie Moore, having digested the new Barthelme biography, Hiding Man, is having none of it. “In a way,” she explains in the current New York Review of Books,
Barthelme’s work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low…
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is contrarian criticism at its very best: illuminating rather than annihilating. Similarly surprising, and revealing, is Moore’s decision to consider the Barthelme oeuvre alongside that of Raymond Carver, in many ways his stylistic opposite. Moore is no short-story slouch herself, and one suspects she’s learned a trick or two from the School of Don B. This might help account for her sure-handed handling of Barthelme’s life and work. At any rate, like Deborah Eisenberg and Zadie Smith, whose essays have also enlivened recent issues of the NYRB, she has the virtue not only of writing like a reader, but of reading like a writer. Check out her Barthelme essay, “How He Wrote His Songs.”
