Donald Barthelme is our most imitated writer today, fully as much as J. D. Salinger was twenty years ago—which is only to say that one index of genius is the extent to which it prompts redundancy in lesser talents. And this retrospective collection [Sixty Stories], which covers Barthelme's entire career, is the most satisfying way of reading him, removed from his usual literary context of fey cartoons, self-parodying ads, poems longer but less poetic than his stories, and his imitators' fictions, which might be defined as the absence of plot, character and consequence—only situations.

Barthelme is certainly no realist; we can have no more dissimilar reactions to contemporary experience and its literary embodient than to compare the solemnity of Saul Bellow, say the conclusion of Mr. Sammler's Planet …, with the coruscating irony of Barthelme in Snow White, parodying Henry James….

But it would be wrong to...