Green Flies

By John Skow

SIXTY STORIES by Donald Barthelme 457 pages; Putnam; $15.95

Donald Barthelme must be high on anyone's list of great unread New Yorker writers, and this retrospective shows why. Open it at any point and there the author is, fluting a different tune but charming the same old snake. How strange life is, say his mannered little perplexities. How strangely strange. How oddly unfathomable. Can't make head or tail of it. Weird.

There is no arguing about this message, or about Barthelme's delivery. After all these years of rehearsal, he ought to have his act together. "Cortes and Montezuma are walking, down by the docks. Little green flies fill the air. Corees and Montezuma are holding hands; from time to time one of them disengages a hand to brush away a fly." No byline is needed; the spooky confluence of matter-of-fact observation (those green flies) and dreamlike lunacy (the handholding strollers) identify the paragraph as Barthelme's.

To be unmistakable, however, is often to be predictable. Barthelme seems to stage the same kind of illusion every time he writes. No, he does not write about Cortes and Montezuma in every story; in fact, he is not writing about them in the sketch quoted above. There is in fact no subject matter to his pieces. Characters and situations are used the way a hypnotist employs a pocket watch swinging at the end of a chain. It is the hypnosis that is important, not the swing of the watch. A short piece called The Party begins, "I went to a party and corrected a pronunciation. The man whose voice I had adjusted fell back into the kitchen. I praised a Bonnard. It was not a Bonnard. My new glasses, I explained, and I'm terribly sorry, but significant variations elude me, vodka exhausts me, I was young once, essential services are being maintained." A passage from The Zombies begins: "The zombies say: 'Wonderful time! Beautiful day! Marvelous singing! Excellent beer! Would that lady marry me? I don't know!' In a high wind the leaves fall from the trees, from the trees." Different dreams, the same empty metaphors. Undeniably, Barthelme has perfected his sleight of hand since 1961, when the first of these 60 stories was published. But as even animal trainers and patient readers know, one trick, no matter how clever, is not enough to sustain a career. By the tenth Barthelme miniature, what began as curiosity and amusement alters to boredom and exasperation. The author's faults--preciosity and an appearance of smugness high among them--become irritatingly noticeable, and the feeling grows that he is not bestirring himself enough to justify continued patronage.--By John Skow

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