[Barthelme] is one of the few authentic examples of the "antinovelist"—that is, 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. The almighty state is always in view. So Barthelme sentences us to the complicity with the system that he suffers from more than anyone. He is wearingly attentive to every detail of the sophistication, the lingo, the massively stultifying second-handedness of everything "we" say. Barthelme is outside everything he writes about in a way that a humorist like Perelman could never be. He is under the terrible discipline that the System inflicts on those who are most fascinated with its relentlessness. He is so smart, so biting, himself so unrelenting in finding far-flung material for his ridicule that his finished product comes out a joke about Hell. We go up sentence, down sentence, up and down. What severity we are sentenced to by this necessary satire! That is because Barthelme the antinovelist is based on the perfect inversion of all current practice, and keeps too many records. This is the way Salinger's characters would write if they were writers, for it is all based on books.
Barthelme is funniest and even touching in Snow White, where the multifaceted plenty of sex (as opposed to the old economy of scarcity) does not bring happiness to our raven-haired heroine and her seven boyfriends. Parodying fairy tales, anti-fairy tales, the captions in Godard movies, market research questionnaires, Barthelme makes it clear that everyone is now so mired in cultured explanations of his and her plight that it is hard to get to bed…. We have been cut off by the words hanging over our heads; our poor little word-riddled souls are distributed all over the landscape. (pp. 273-74)
Alfred Kazin, in his Bright Book of Life: American Novelists & Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (copyright © 1971, 1973 by Alfred Kazin; reprinted by permission of Little, Brown, and Co. in association with The Atlantic Monthly Press), Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1973.
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