DAPHNE MERKIN
745
herent dangers. For a demonstration of them at their most serious,
one need only take a look at
Moon Deluxe,
a collection of stories by
Frederick Barthelme (brother of Donald).
Many of these stories, like Beattie's and Tallent's and the other
Barthelme's, first appeared in
The New Yorker,
and there is a certain
shared aspect of glossy inertness to them. Frederick Barthelme has
sensibility in abundance, but never has so much been expended on
so little; it is as though a very acute observer had decided to take up
residence in a motel off a highway for several years and record his
impressions. Barthelme's stories are set in anonymous locations–
shopping malls, supermarkets, and, most often, apartment condo–
miniums- where the living is transient and conversation is fleeting.
Again, there are no secrets here, not even when a guy named Milby
explains why he has hit Lois, the friend of a woman named Cherry
in a story named "Lumber": "She deserved it," he tells Frank, the
narrator, "you know what I'm saying? I mean, bitch, bitch, bitch–
you got to do something.... The thing is, they take advantage of
everything- all the differences- but you can't. You get pissed after
a while." "I wonder," Frank muses, "why I don't tell him what I want
to tell him, why he scares me." The reader might well wonder too. If
Frank actually bothered to explain why Milby's misogyny passed off
as regular-guy machismo (and this effect Barthelme handles ex–
pertly) frightens him, we might get really interested. But that revela–
tion, in turn, would give the story a focus, a gravitational pull, and
this Barthelme won't or can't do.
What he does instead is provide incidentals, slightly awry
clues: "The waitress, a pudgy woman wearing a purple satin-look
bowling shirt with 'GlueSlingers' in gold script across the back...."
("Gila Flambe") "The girl is six feet tall. As I look at her standing
beside the couch , dialing numbers on the telephone, I realize that
the pants are too big by design, a way to simultaneously disguise and
exploit her thinness." ("Violet") "Near the stationery, you face a
shelf of ceramic coin banks shaped and painted like trays of big
crinkle French fries smothered in ketchup." ("Moon Deluxe") Some–
times aT-shirt-with-slogan seems to be worn by a character in lieu
of personality-or just to give Barthelme the chance to describe it:
"She answered Lily's abbreviated knock wearing khaki shorts and a
white T-shirt with 'So many men, so little time' silk-screened in two
lines across the chest. 'Irony,' Lily says, pointing at the shirt."
If
God
is in the details, surely there has also to be at least the semblance of a
master plan? So consummate a designer as Flaubert was detail–
obsessed, documenting his fiction constantly, but when he writes in
