Harold Ross, you've done it again!

Good New Yorker this week! When I saw that there was a "new" story by Italo Calvino, I was suspicious: I tend to figure that if something by a very famous writer is being published more than 40 years after it was written—at least if the writer was famous in his own day—then it's probably going to be B- or C-level work. However, "The Daughters of the Moon" is entertaining, and I was tickled pink (I believe they say*) by the following segment, regarding an alternate New York City:

"That morning, the city was celebrating Consumer Thanksgiving Day. This feast came around every year, on a day in November, and had been set up to allow shoppers to display their gratitude toward the god Production, who tirelessly satisfied their every needs. The biggest department store in town organized a parade every year: an enormous balloon in the shape of a garishly colored doll was paraded through the main streets..."

Again, normally I'd be inclined to turn up my nose at such arguably heavy-handed satire, but what's so beautiful about this is that it's pretty much just straight description: he lets the event satirize itself, like something that continues to cook after you take it out of the oven(?). What a shame that Calvino wasn't writing a few decades later: these days he could have noted too that the garish balloons are in the shape not of anonymous dolls but of beloved corporate logos...**

And right after the Calvino, an article by Louis Menard about Alt85 favorite Donald Barthelme!

First, a handful of quibbles.

1. To the extent that this article has a "thesis," it is that Barthelme is more a postmodernist in the sense of almost the ultra-modern than he is a postmodernist in the sense of the anti-modern: that he wished to continue the course set out by Joyce and continued by Beckett. Which is all well and good—I mean, I agree with that—but what bothers me is that the reason I agree with it is that I've read the essay in which Barthelme says so himself—and Menard doesn't in my opinion adequately acknowledge that this revelatory new reading ("Barthelme reconsidered," says the subhead) merely echoes the writer's own explicit claims. Not that you can't emphasize something that a writer already said, but shouldn't you at least focus on the fact that the writer said it instead of presenting it as some kind of novel new interpretation? (Or does Menard mention it and I missed it? I do tend to skim nonfiction.)
2. Upon rereading Forty Stories last fall, I was surprised to find that the stories I liked best of all were the "straighter" ones, which Menard essentially dismisses in a sentence: "His writing became less experimental, but after 1975 the interest in literary experiment...was no longer the fashion"—as though these stories were cop- or even sell-outs, evidence of a bow to fashion. What makes those stories so great, what makes me see them as a Barthelme strengthened rather than a Barthelme cowed, is that they show restraint but still hum with what Pynchon once called Barthelmismo. (I'm trying to think of an analogy in music and the best I can come up with off the top of my head is Ween's going from the insanity of something like The Pod or Pure Guava to the so-ironic-it's-not-even-ironic-anymore 12 Golden Country Greats***—or, more to the point [since the irony is analogically out of place] something like "What Deaner Was Talkin' About," a straight, beautiful song that reveals rather than betrays the essence of the Ween brothers' songwriting.) Indeed in general I can't help but feel as if Menard, even though he says that there was emotion in his stories, is being a little too abstract and formalistic about Barthelme's work.
3. Menard says that The Dead Father "is so nakedly a struggle to make a dark comedy of the author's relationship with his two fathers, Beckett and Donald, Sr., that it is painful to read. Even a Freudian might wince"; he then goes on to quote something funny that is much funnier in context. (Besides which—what, do you like your dark comedy not to make you wince? You take your dark comedy light?) What the fuck, Louis?

Anyway, the article was fine—I'm always glad to read something about old Don, as long as it isn't flat-out illiterate—but my favorite part is this incredible, damning quotation from an article he wrote in 1964: "Fiction after Joyce seems to have devoted itself to propaganda, to novels of social relationships, to short stories constructed mousetrap-like to supply, at the finish, a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated, or to works written as vehicles for saying no! in thunder." Barthelme is like a kung-fu master in plainclothes, shoved and threatened by an enormous drunken lout at a pub and then finally, with the slightest and most effortless of gestures (as if brushing lint from his sweater or shaking stiffness from his wrist), hurling all 300 lbs. of the guy—using the guy's own momentum, naturally—over the bar and into the mirror. In a sentence he's highlighted everything that is wrong with contemporary fiction. That mousetrap bit in particular: that is exactly what I hate about most short stories, and is (as it happens) exactly why I did a big rewrite of a short story two weeks ago: not that I did it right or well, necessarily, but I finally couldn't stand anymore how goddamned obvious the whole thing was. Nowadays we think obvious means predictable, but there's more to it than that. We shouldn't feel when we're reading something that we've read it before. I'm not saying I'm up to the challenge, necessarily—but if you're not willing to take the challenge, why even write? A lot of easier jobs pay a lot better.

* But what the fuck?

** Or was that true in the '60s, too, and Calvino missed (or chose to skip) that element?

*** For a particularly illustrative juxtaposition, listen to both the Pure Guava studio version and the 12 Golden Country Greats–era live version of "I Saw Gener Cryin' in His Sleep." Also good: "Pumpin' 4 the Man."