I've been putting off responding to Barthelme because I am still somewhat undecided. When I like a story of his, I love it, but when I dislike one, I really loathe it. Because I'm bad at doing what I'm told (and I hate only reading parts of a book), I just started reading from the beginning of the book rather than sticking to the assigned stories. Stories I loved include: A Shower of Gold, Me and Miss Mandible, Game, A Manual for Sons, The School. I like these stories at least in part because of what they taught me. The lessons include: list things in my stories, don't be afraid of relevant tangents, stand everything on its head, be weird sometimes. As I'm writing this blog, I already see a little bit of Barthelme seeping in. The good Barthelme that I understand and appreciate. There is bad Barthelme for me. Bad Barthelme appears in stories such as: For I'm the Boy, Will You Tell Me?, Alice. I enjoy the feeling of spinning out of control that I get in a story like Game, but in stories like Alice I feel like I am thrown off of the spinning thing. I don't like being thrown off of things. I'm reluctant to admit this, because I really do enjoy new and different things. I don't want to be tropophobic. I am willing to look things up that I don't understand or accept definitions that the author gives me, but I don't feel like I should need somebody to explain a story to me. If that is the case, I think it is a bad story.
Even in the bad stories, there are moments where Barthelme's (proper possessive grammar?) genius shines light down and cues the Angel Choir. Lines like "...and Shotwell has a .25 caliber Beretta which I do not know about strapped to his right calf" absolutely slay me with their deadpan delivery. In airing all of my thoughts, I guess that I have made up my mind to like Donald Barthelme. My only gripe is that everything he writes isn't brilliant in my eyes, which is a product of my own unreasonable expectations for him. I know that even Babe Ruth hit some grounders, but I don't watch old clips to see grounders and I don't read to see stories that appear to be a random smashing of words and phrases onto a page. Somewhere the tone of this turned negative, and I'm not sure why.
4 comments:
I concur. (that's not really helpful at all, is it?) There were some Barthelme stories that blew my mind, and others that I had to fight with just to get through them. (Views of my Father Weeping was sort of one of them, Saving Robert Kennedy from Drowning was definitely one of them).
I do think, however, that I will never forgive Barthelme for robbing me of my decently flowing prose. Damn him and his stilted syntax.
What I think is most interesting is that we all had the exact same compliments and complaints for this author, but we all had different favorites.
I shared most of your opinions on the stories, but I felt it would be unnecessary to go through and list each story that I liked and each that I disliked.
I really liked "I Bought a Little City."
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