He has been hailed by the full range of academic journals, literary quarterlies, and national news magazines as one of the most imitated and influential stylists writing today. He has received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Award, plus numerous other literary prizes. Several times married and divorced, Barthelme writes with both deep feeling and sardonic style about the quality of personal lives, relationships, and material fortunes in contemporary America.
Because of his reliance upon language (instead of plot and character) to carry the theme of his stories, Barthelme has incurred the wrath of such traditional critics as Alfred Kazin and Nathan Scott. With Barthelme we have been "sentenced to the sentence," Kazin writes in Bright Book of Life (1973), and further complains that, "he operates by countermeasures only, and the system that is his own joy to attack permits him what an authoritarian system always permits its lonely dissenters: the sense of their own weakness." Several of Barthelme's most severe critics base their objections on moral grounds. Joyce Carol Oates seized upon a character's statement, "Fragments are the only form I trust," and used it as the basis for Barthelme's supposed ethic, which she then attacked: "This from a writer of arguable genius, whose work reflects the anxiety he himself must feel, in book after book, that his brain is all fragments." What happens, Oates wondered, when life came to imitate art? "And then who is in charge, who believed himself cleverly impotent, who supposed he had abdicated all conscious design"" Pearl K.
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