Snow White, Barthelme's second book and first novel, brilliantly combines metafictional techniques with a highly refracted critique of contemporary culture. Approached one way, the novel is about democratization in all its manifestations — political, sexual, economic, literary, and above all linguistic. Equality may be the novel's subject, perhaps even its aim, but it is an equality that invariably becomes reductive, in which nothing and no one is any better than anything or anyone else. The desire for equality may easily degenerate (just by substituting and deleting a few letters of the alphabet) into a low-grade longing for equanimity. In the world of Snow White, which is the world of consumerism, dissatisfaction is omnipresent. The characters yearn not only for commodities but for romance.

In its own peculiarly perverse way, the novel attempts to affirm an individualism that has been all but lost to modern society. Snow...