[What some] critics fail to notice is that Barthelme does not confine himself to the recording of public insanities. He has, in fact, been more concerned with private tragedy, specifically the tragedy which results from "emotional defeats," and in Barthelme's fiction that means only one thing: the failure of a man to achieve a satisfactory and lasting relationship with a woman. In his four collections of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life; Sadness, and in the novel Snow White, he charts over and over again the agony caused by this failure. Though often concealed by a cover of complicated language, as in "The Indian Uprising,"… and though not always the main subject, this kind of defeat is touched on in most of Barthelme's collected "fragments."
Barthelme is first and foremost an intellectual writer, a cool observer, who transforms and distances emotional suffering through wit and irony and, above all, through verbal play. He continually surprises with revitalized clichés and invented words. He recognizes the appropriate moment for literary allusions, for juxtaposing the concrete with the abstract, and … for infusing life into inanimate objects. He uses with great originality Joycean tricks: questions and answers, lists, double and triple entendres, plays on words. And he has a special gift for fantasy, sometimes whimsical, sometimes grotesque. It is, then, by means of verbal brilliance that Barthelme turns the agony of his characters into something ridiculous or comic, and forces the reader to respond to the suffering with laughter and esthetic joy. (Barthelme is worth reading for his humor alone). But the richness and complexity of his fiction does not derive solely from his verbal talent. In most of his stories he is writing about a number of things at once, often unrelated, and it is the mesh-ing of these disparate subjects into an artistic whole, reinforced by a vision layered in ambiguity and a voice always compelling, which makes Barthelme an original and important writer.
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