Steven Barthelme

It was fine. Some nice observations, occasionally a poignant moment. He often does the thing lots of writers do where they leave an ending sort of unraveled or ambiguous and make you put together what it means. Sometimes this can be neat, but more often than not, it just feels like the author's using a gimmick or didn't quite know how to tie the story up. With Barthelme (as in most cases), it tends to feel like the latter.

I got the book by accident, picking it up from the publisher's table at a conference after mistakingly thinking I was getting something by his brother Donald Barthelme. I liked it well enough but didn't generally find it inspiring and probably wouldn't seek this Barthelme out in particular in the future. I'll read him with interest if I run across him in a magazine, though.… (plus d'informations)

This is an uneven, but rather interesting, collection of short (some very short) stories about various quirky folks, cats and relationships. I think his longer stories actually worked better and I felt "Interview" (about a tax lawyer who quits his job, wanders back to Austin, where he went to college, and gets a job as a mechanic), "Bye Bye Brewster" (a surprisingly sweet friendship story between a guy in his 40s and a guy in his 70s, whose lives cross in an apartment complex in Arizona) and "Claire" (Where a man borrows money from his ex/Claire and gets sucked backed into his world of gambling and regret, but he actually wins a lot of money and determines that did not help a thing - he still is sorry he let Claire go) were real standouts. Barthelme is exceptionally good at caring about his characters, and so while they can be rather repugnant, I always kind of felt sorry for them. He writes exceptionally well from the viewpoint of someone who has made a horrible decision and how they stumble through that, both in effects on others and their own lives. They all had a few threads that made them likeable. My biggest complaint about this collection, and why I did not rate it much higher, is the nausea-producing and highly implausable title story "Hush, Hush" about a sexual affair between a father, who ends up being a creepy stalking on top of it all, and his grown daughter (who shows up on his doorstep one day, after a life of him not knowing she existed). That one was weird, and not in a good way, and it just put a whole funk on the book. It almost seemed mislpaced in an otherwise decent collection. Why that one was chosen as the title piece is beyond me. Anyway, I do think Bathleme is well worth watching and enjoying. His dialog, quick-paced stories and characters are usually fun, and human in both good and bad ways, so nice and complex and for the most part, interesting and a joy to read.… (plus d'informations)