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Donald Barthelme |
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Two years after Donald Barthelme's death, his friend Robert Coover observed that his name had achieved a new currency as an adjective: the term "Barthelmesque," Coover wrote, refers not only to a style- "precise, urbane, ironic, rivetingly succinct, and accumulative in its comical and often surreal juxtapositions"-but also to a perspective familiar to Barthelme's readers, a worldview "bleakly comic, paradoxical, and grounded in the beautiful absurdities of language." John Barth, another friend, noted that Barthelme's view changed only slightly over the course of his career as editor, journalist, novelist, and short-story master-that he seemed as an artist "to have been born full-grown." In comments included in the Summer 1991 issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction , Barth speaks for most of Barthelme's critics in noting further that his immediately recognizable voice found its most influential forum in the rigorously confined genre of short fiction: "His natural narrative space was the short story, if story is the right word for those often plotless marvels of which he published some seven [i.e, nine] volumes over twenty years."
While some critics find Barthelme's "plotless marvels" both depressing and demandingly difficult, other readers find his explorations of postmodern sensibility oddly consoling.
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