Tales of the Single Existence
GIMELSON, DEBORAH
Tales of the Single Existence Moon Deluxe By Frederick Barthelme Simon & Schuster. 240 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Deborah Gimelson After a period of neglect due largely to the financial realities...
...Reviewed by Deborah Gimelson After a period of neglect due largely to the financial realities of the publishing industry, the American short story is once again commanding the attention of editors and readers alike...
...In time, one hopes, they will relieve us of the currently dominant style of literary mirror gazing exhibited in Moon Deluxe...
...But no matter...
...His protagonists are mostly men over 30 led into complications by younger women sporting jogging shorts of every possible hue with coordinated tank tops...
...The sort of passionate human connections that draw a reader in are absent...
...Actually, "Moon Deluxe" is something of a variation on Barthelme's standard situation...
...the aptly titled "Box Step" leads an office worker and her boss through the dull symmetry of their daily lives without ever defining their relationship...
...The hero, Edward, is a young man living in an apartment complex that could be anywhere between New York and Los Angeles...
...Among America's least flattering national characteristics, for example, is the tendency of many of us to live in a state of adolescent self-preoccupation far beyond the age when that is appropriate or excusable...
...serves to overemphasize the already obvious alienation of the characters...
...Except for "Moon Deluxe," all the tales are told in the first person...
...Luckily, Barthelme's failings, while common among young American writers, are far from universal...
...In keeping with his housing development world, Barthelmeoftenusesasort of split-level story construction, initiating the action at one location and moving it to a second for the payoff...
...But Barthelme is unwilling or unable to explore beyond its most superficial, and tedious, manifestations...
...Still, it clearly demonstrates his style and themes...
...How he arrived at this conclusion is a bit obscure, since the one previous time we see them together, Eileen appears momentarily from behind a bush and disappears before we get any senseofher...
...The two women quarrel over his presence, then show him to the door where they both kiss him "with their mouths resolutely closed...
...He is invited to a dinner party by Eileen, an older woman he likes because "she is easy to get along with...
...The companion turns out to be a redhead who Edward recalls making eyes at him from a passing car earlier in the day...
...It is not this milieu as such that is the problem, though...
...They are open enough to see events from more than one viewpoint?to let some hope and enthusiasm filter in as counterweights to fear and loneliness-and sufficiently confident of their prose not to be fearful of a little emotion...
...Barthelme's purpose, one would guess, is to demonstrate the emptiness of his people's lives by making them seem less important than-or at least defined by-the objects around them...
...The quirky setup, however, is never fully exploited...
...Barthelme's settings are carefully-laid suburban tableaux composed of apartment complexes with swimming pools, gaudily decorated motels, flamingo-bedecked lawns, shopping malls, and elaborate roadside restaurants...
...The present tense (in which all the stories in the volume are written) cuts off the events from the actors' pasts, imparting a sense of undernourishment...
...New collections are being issued by the major trade houses at an accelerating pace, and several small and university presses now sponsor contests that have book publication as first prize...
...a detached elegance of tone seems to be the primary concern...
...Such a condition is hardly unique...
...Meanwhile, the author avoids the issue he has raised: What sort of need could have brought this aimless man under the sexual sway of two lesbians who cannot conceivably offer him fulfillment...
...It is not enough to show that Edward is misled by his fantasies, the roles expected of him, and his inability to communicate...
...A neutral tone pervades, whether Edward is expressing his distaste for cognac, or whether An-tonia, Lily'sroommate, is throwing her spurned-lover's fit...
...As a result, what he gives us is a mere hodgepodge of despair and irrelevant detail...
...The impersonal "you" (the story begins: "You're stuck in traffic on the way home from work...
...A batch of younger writers is slipping into place behind the Cheevers and Updikes...
...Lily flirts with him mercilessly...
...The other stories in the volume have similar troubles...
...Taking Lily home, he finds that she has a female roommate with whom she is carrying on an ambiguous relationship...
...That's what I've been trying to tell you," she says in a moment that, if handled adroitly, could have been comic...
...Shopgirls" is about a voyeur whose turf is a shopping center...
...Moving rapidly through interpersonal encounters that carry little emotional weight, enslaved to our egos and our thirst for sensation, we find it difficult to perceive the world from any perspective outside the "I...
...Other authors just beginning to hit their stride are willing to confront life's conflicts head-on...
...Nevertheless, they are worthy of attention because their weaknesses afford us an opportunity to study the impact of several less appealing aspects of our society on some of our artists...
...Lumber" plods through a romance between another deadhead and his good Samaritan girlfriend...
...In "Moon Deluxe" the tactic happens to make sense, because Edward apparently retains some emotional tie to the apartment Lily now shares...
...Consider the title story, presumably selected for that distinction by Barthelme or the editor because it best exemplifies the book's preoccupations and strengths...
...Edward survives the meal and the tasteless jokes of the hostess and her boyfriend, Phil, only to be practically shoved out the door with this aggressive stranger...
...One tires quickly...
...Barthelme reflects this infantilism in both his incessant use of first-person narrative and the emptiness of his content...
...Instead, the reader is enervated by a meticulous description of the flat itself, down to the effects of track lighting on the walls, a serving cart parked in front of a sliding glass door, and a window-size photograph of a man in a fedora...
...it is the author's delineation of his characters' relationships to the landscape and to one another, and the conscious sterility of his language...
...Amid this resurgence, the stories by Frederick Barthelme gathered in Moon Deluxe?13 of the 18 originally appeared in the New Yorker-are rather mediocre examples of the genre...
...Gila Flambe" brings a listless hero and his Mazda together with an odd couple and their dog in a family-style restaurant on an unnamed town's neon-lit main drag...
...The dialogue, too, although often well rendered, only points up the fact that each of the speakers is locked inside his own monologue...
...Edward ends as he began, alone in a world where the only visible light is reflected off the pool's surface and his shoes are always wet from the last, damp late-night walk...
...Edward goes to Eileen's, where he meets Lily, a blonde occupying an apartment recently vacated by another woman with whom he had a" thing...
...The entanglements of this plot offer possibilities, yet Barthelme manages, as he almost always does, to drain energy from the action by employing ill-suited prose devices...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 22
