As one staffer who had worked with Barthelme at
The New Yorker commented in a 14 August 1989 tribute to the author: "When he was writing a lot, you had this sense that there was someone else sort of like you, living in your city, and saying things that meant something about your life. It was like having a companion in the world." Some reviewers found his parodies and experiments tedious, repetitious, even trivializing; others found them exhilaratingly irreverent, radically subversive, and entertaining even when most profoundly serious, as the author of a tribute in
The New Yorker recalled: "Barthelme was erudite and culturally rigorous, but he was always terrifically funny as well, and when his despairing characters and jagged scenes and sudden stops and starts had you tumbling wildly, free-falling through a story, it was laughter that kept you afloat and made you feel there would probably be a safe landing."
His idiosyncratic humor is perhaps the one constant in his work, which coheres around his comic view of a tragically fractured cosmos.
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