Donald Barthelme is more attracted to the indisputable charm of brevity than to the disputable charm of narration. If he has a design upon us, it is that we will be rendered unable to resist the temptation of fondling his sentences. We are to read his 16 stories, collected in Great Days, as we read Shakespeare's sonnets, attending to what they do while they pretend to do nothing more than say: "You, my beloved, have killed me." The stories are brief for the same reason that the sonnets have 14 lines—because that is enough. The discrepancy between the brevity of the event and the amount of verbal business negotiated is part of the appeal in both cases. But "appeal" is the wrong word. I take it back. These stories do not emit appeals. They do not ask to be believed, or even to have disbelief suspended for the duration of the narrative.
It is a shock to come upon a sentence of truth here and there in Barthelme's fiction…. The truth doesn't damage Barthelme's story, I admit, but it encourages a recidivist nostalgia for the conjunction of sentence and event, an emotion generally and firmly held at bay in Barthelme's fiction. If we are to fall back into the habit of believing things and crediting what we're told, there will be no end to our debauchery: In the twinkling of an I we shall be found longing for the old fleshpots of conviction, form, continuity, the priority of beginning over middle and of middle, in turn, over end….
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