Bob the Gambler
Barthelme, Frederick
PLACE YOUR BETS Valerie Sayers ~ eading Frederick Barthelme, I often feel the way I do when I'm reading a slick magazine s t u f f e d with glossy ads and just enough substance to cut...
...Nevertheless, there's always been the sand in the bed, the sense that Barthelme was and is onto something important about contemporary life, that even in his fictional repetitions he is forcing his readers to took closely at how overwhelmed and isolated, how hungry for connection, Americans often feel...
...Strange, longing references to childhood Catholicism sneak into works like The Brothers...
...The distinction between authority and authoritarianism may be a useful contribution to the notion of social order and this book offers many other insightful observations...
...All Barthelme's characters--male and female, adult and teenager--sounded like one another, and they all sounded like the stories' narrators, bright and whimsical and given to wiseguy banter and neat closure...
...Bernard It/iring Fr...
...winning became tepid fast...
...In some senses, then, it's back on the old Barthelme territory of consumerism, but there a r e clear signs of the deepening empathy for his characters that has marked his latest work, a sweetness of tone, a hopefulness of outlook...
...Early on, we meet a character named Baby whose first husband has died in the Paradise, and we don't need any further signal that this is a novel about the kind of death that gambling can bring on...
...Kennedy and Charles describe what they call the "de-authorization" of various American institutions: marriage and family, education, the workplace and the professions, government, business, religion, and law...
...Americans misunderstand and misinterpret authority because they confuse it with authoritarianism, which has become unacceptable in today's posthierarchical world...
...Joan Chittister Ana Maria Ezcurra Paul Collins Pablo Richard "It is difficult to imagine how any editor will be able to assemble a group more competent and exciting than those Gary MacEoin has brought together...
...I sort of felt it was more exhilarating to lose a lot than win a little," he says...
...PLACE YOUR BETS Valerie Sayers ~ eading Frederick Barthelme, I often feel the way I do when I'm reading a slick magazine s t u f f e d with glossy ads and just enough substance to cut through my guilt...
...Authoritarianism, in their view, involves conformity imposed from above by hierarchies...
...The husband-and-wife team of Eugene Kennedy, a psychologist and author of numerous books on religious and social issues, and Sara C. Charles, a prominent psychiatrist, look at one element of a well-ordered society in their discussion of the concept of authority...
...His New South characters (his territory is generally the Mississippi Gulf Coast) were more often than not privileged and educated, caught up in boredom and ennui...
...Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame...
...This is a quibble, however, for Ray's architectural practice is failing at the beginning of the novel anyway, and he and his wife Jewel make utterly believable gamblers...
...Barthelme's description of that night is an exhilarating wonder...
...Losing meant you had to play more, try harder...
...The gambling, which the reader has almost certainly experienced with dread, has functioned as a cleansing fire in the end, and the story (except for its strange elliptical conclusion, which I found frustrating in the old-Barthelme way) is full of redemptive possibility...
...Bob the Gambler is openly sympathetic to its characters and their longing for meaning...
...The book's recommendations for solving problems often seem like the type of nostrums peddled by management consultants ThepAPACY and thepEOPLE of GOD Gary MacEoin, editor Ten of the world's leading theo-logians and Vatican watchers explore a range of issues including infallibility, the magisterium, papal elections, the place of women, the relationship of the papacy to an indigenous church, and the role of the papacy in an ecumenical church...
...The family, stripped of its material goods, finds a center (and begins eating dinner again...
...It's as if, this time around, Barthelme has accompanied Ray on his scary, funny, crucial journey...
...For example, they argue that breaking the link between marriage and sex has resulted in a loss of the authority of marriage...
...SA8, Box 302 Maryknoll, NY 10545-0302 Commonweal 2 5 February 13, 1998...
...Losing burned intensely...
...He's an architect, but not a very convincing one, since his remarks about his work are vague and general: "We had a lot of ideas for this house, but whenever I drew it up the place looked remarkably unexotic...
...Men and women need to reestablish this link in order to restore the health of family life...
...Barthelme makes funny references to Dostoevski's obsessions with gambling and has Ray construct his own funny running commentary about betting...
...When Ray sets fire to present and future, ennui goes up in flames, and Barthelme is absolutely convincing about Ray's need to destroy the empty, vapid security he has built up...
...He has also paid attention to new subjects--just as you think he's blindered, writing about the South without ever mentioning race, you'll turn a page and find the subject raised...
...Francis Murphy John Wilkins Alain Woodrow Giancarlo Zizola Harvey Cox Sr...
...then as you wonder why none of his characters is ever interested in politics, he'll write a novel like Painted Desert, which immerses itself in race and politics and culture...
...Since human beings achieve their goals by working together, there must be forces that hold them together and direct their efforts toward common purposes...
...Ostensibly realistic, this fiction gave a tightly cropped view of the world...
...Authority, they argue, should be clearly distinguished from authoritarianism...
...As a result, the concept remains vague and the term "deauthorization" tends to be used as a magic key that unlocks the secret of every current social problem...
...There is something more enCommonweal 2 4 February 13, 1998 gaged in Barthelme's later work, and especially in this novel, something more purposeful, something less irritating, more satisfying...
...His latest novel, Bob the Gambler, is, naturally, about gambling...
...Ray and Jewel and RV sell all their possessions and move in with Ray's mother, a good, quirky, character who's faced her own dark night when her husband, whom she's left, died alone in a Houston condo...
...WHOM DO WE TRUST...
...The stories I read in the New Yorker in the '70s and '80s often frustrated me precisely because of their trademark minimalisms: the jittery present tense, the flat prose, the name brands, the preoccupation with food, cars, and the surface of things...
...Recent publications, such as Dennis Wrong's masterly The Problem of Order (Basic Books, 1994), suggest that attention is turning once again, however, to how a well-ordered society is established and maintained...
...Eventually, Ray spends one long night of the soul losing every piece of credit he can get his hands on...
...Unlike Raymond Carver, who was accused of being a minimalist himself, Barthelme was not writing about the working class and the tensions of not enough money...
...After examining these institutions, they offer suggestions for rediscovering authority in each...
...Barthelme's work has altered recently in small but significant ways...
...Barthelme, in his clever, mannered, ironic voice, clearly felt some sympathy for these people as he made, again and again, the fictional point that the rampant consumerism, the stuff in their lives, was clogging their very souls, but the early work often struck me as repetitive and overly conceptual...
...His protagonist here is not named Bob at all, but Ray Kaiser (the title's a reference to the film Bob te Flambeur, which Ray brings home from the video store...
...Still, Kennedy and Charles never manage to say precisely what authority is, aside from describing it as "a positive, dynamic force ordered to growth...
...From the beginning, Barthelme sets up a parallel between the decline of Ray and Jewel and the decline of Jewel's fourteen-year-old daughter, RV (the name is never explained, but maybe it doesn't need to be...
...Order can be oppressive as well as functional, though, and social thinkers for the past twenty to thirty years have tended to be more concerned with issues of personal liberation and distributive justice than with questions of cooperation and collective efficiency...
...Authority, by contrast, involves the agency of an author, someone who promotes growth by giving meaning and shape to human relationships...
...He's not standing on the sidelines, amused and ironic, anymore...
...RV is a great presence in the book, a focal point beyond themselves for Ray and Jewel, who at the beginning of their foray ignore the girl's obvious pleas for attention (in a good objectification of her need, she's always hungry, and her parents have always forgotten about dinner...
...After reading him, I've got sand in the bed: something's bothering me, something's keeping me awake, but the source is diffuse, irritating, hard to spot...
...The prose has become more musical...
...Carl L. Bankston I I I alcott Parsons, the grand theorist of American sociology from the thirties through the fifties, described maintaining order as a central problem of any social system...
...In recent years, Barthelme has let his sentences linger longer over physical details, and there's more a sense of place, especially of Biloxi, which has played such a big role in his work...
...They are also gamblers with whom readers a r e bound to sympathize, gamblers whose actions are completely predictable or, maybe, inevitable---at least once they've set themselves in motion...
...Her latest novel is Brain Fever (Doubleday...
...While RV plays around with vodka and cars and a Motel 6, Ray and Jewel have fallen under the spell of the Paradise Casino (another neon sign of a name), lovingly and wittily described...
...Bernard Cooke At bookstores or direct MC/VISA 1-800-258-5838 ORBIS BOOKS Dept...
Vol. 125 • February 1998 • No. 3
