A Minimalist Author Among the Magnolias

A visitor having dinner with Frederick Barthelme, bard of suburban disconnectedness, has driven out from New Orleans to an obscure college town bristling with fast-food signs, onto a campus whose students can’t seem to say where the English department is. At the restaurant, the waitress says the special is a pasta dish called Frank.

This ought to be in a Frederick Barthelme story, but it’s not. It’s just something that happened in the place where Barthelme lives, a world much like the one he describes with such exquisite economy in two cinematic novels and a series of stories on the theme of human incompatibility.

That world is loosely the New South, but the landscape could be anywhere. With enormous wit, the 42-year-old Barthelme has managed to capture contemporary life for the growing numbers of Americans who live in the vast and homogenous suburb the nation seems intent on becoming.

He has also captured critical attention (both good and bad) as a leading exponent of what has come to be called minimalist fiction, and now his work is likely to be filmed. Barthelme has turned his novel “Second Marriage” into a screenplay for 20th Century Fox, and has done the same for his other novel, “Tracer,” for Wolfgang Films, an offshoot of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.

Those novels, and the stories he frequently publishes in the New Yorker, depict a land of cable television and plentiful parking whose denizens are so mobile they bounce off one another like pinballs with the thinnest bands of Velcro tacked on. They’re always liable to jump into the Honda and drive over to the MiniMart. Barthelme’s work is littered with brand-name detritus: Burger Kings and Stroh’s appear as often as they do in the San Fernando Valley.

Barthelme once said he doesn’t want anything in his stories that you can’t buy at a 7-Eleven, but he insists his fiction is not intended as an attack on such things.

“One of my major dissatisfactions with the reviewing of my work is that it assumes a critique,” he said, sipping the first of perhaps a dozen Diet Cokes in a rambling interview that started at his kitchen table. “I think there are pleasures to be had in barbecued chicken and white bread.”

So do his characters, who almost never eat vegetables but can be moved to romance by the vista of an empty parking lot at dusk.

A Battle of Sexes

Most of all, though, Barthelme’s fictional world is one in which men and women can’t get along. The men are either ciphers or silly, and the women, scarred and dissatisfied, tend to prefer one another. Barthelme, it turns out, can’t blame them.

“In bald terms, I’m much fonder of women as people than men,” he said. “The men are taking a hit. I see these people as John Wayne figures, or maybe Gary Cooper would be better. One thing they’ve learned, and they’ve learned it from the women in the stories, is to endure.”

Whether Barthelme’s fiction endures remains to be seen, but he is gaining notoriety now after years in the shadow of his older brother, Donald, whom Frederick calls his “first and principal teacher,” and whose influence lingers faintly in his work, although Donald Barthelme’s stately surrealism is replaced in his brother’s work by a kind of literary superrealism, like the painters who render their surroundings with such garish fidelity.

Critics have reacted to Frederick Barthelme with everything from animosity to delight, but for better or worse he is already being named among a new breed of Southern writers, and also amid a group of short story specialists like Anne Beattie, Mary Robison and Raymond Carver, who are known for their spare and often bleak portrayal of human relationships.

Hackles Raised

These writers have raised some hackles. Detractors complain that their work is lifeless and bloodless, without soul or expression. Novelist Don DeLillo has called it “around the house and in the yard” fiction, and the late John Gardner complained that it “celebrates ideas no father would wittingly teach his children.”

To his detractors, Barthelme’s fictional universe could be summed up by the main character of his novel “Second Marriage,” when the wife demands that her husband say what he means.

“I do,” Henry replies. “I just don’t mean much.”

But to others, Barthelme’s stories mean a great deal. Asserts Donald Barthelme, a big fan of his brother’s work, “Behind the Day-Glo and McDonald’s, there’s still Heidegger and Pollock. They may not announce themselves, but they’re still there.”

However, Barthelme does mean to be funny--slapstick, satirical, and even tragicomic. Consider the beginning of “Rain Check,” the last story in the collection entitled “Moon Deluxe”:

“Hoping for quick intimacy, I start telling Lucille things I’m afraid of. It’s a late dinner, our first meeting, a date arranged by a friend of hers who works in my office, and we go to the restaurant Lucille chooses, a place called Red Legs, where all the waiters work in dresses. . . . There’s a tropical flavor, too--a couple of dozen giant dead banana plants. Lucille says she’s not afraid of anything, so I shut up about loneliness.”

And if the stories aren’t meant to condemn our culture as cheap orange plastic, they succeed in that role nevertheless. Barthelme’s heroes, all bearing a suspicious resemblance to the author, have hilarious adventures in tacky restaurants like the fictional Pie Country. But other characters seem maimed by television and drugged by too much refined sugar. They have no attention span, their repartee relies on sportscaster cliches, and even the works they inhabit are brief and dissociated, like pieces of a TV program between commercials.

“They find the world, and it’s not Disney World, and they’re living with that,” Barthelme said. “They’re coping with that.”

Coping is a major Barthelme theme, and there is a certain stoicism about the author himself, an occasionally taciturn man who smokes two packs a day and calls himself an optimist. Barthelme is a tall, brooding figure, and like his work, he is alternately funny and sad, engaging and austere.

Barthelme has never married and doesn’t want children. “I tend to make women friends and live with them for a long time,” he said. “Marriage just doesn’t seem interesting to me as a thing to do.”

Son of Architect

As director of the creative writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he has taught since 1977, Barthelme lives in Hattiesburg, a place where the Ramada Inn is among the best restaurants and people shop by mail. Despite his wide cultural interests, that doesn’t bother him. The son of a successful Houston architect, Barthelme has an abiding interest in architecture and lives in a town that has lots of nice old houses.

Yet Barthelme lives in a bland-looking development at the edge of town, an area he describes as “the land of the dead,” and one that appears in keeping with a minimalist outlook.

Varied Career

Fiction is only the latest of the crafts Barthelme has practiced in his varied career. He has been a rock musician (albeit one whose music had “more to do with John Cage than Chuck Berry”), draftsman, advertising copywriter and avant-garde artist who made entire rooms his canvas.

“I worked in tape,” he says with a laugh. “I used electrical tape, then I used duct tape, then I moved on to contact paper. I really liked contact paper.”

A nocturnal creature (“I prefer it when it’s not light”), Barthelme writes from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. most nights, fueled by the Diet Cokes he drinks constantly. He is also a computer buff and wrote rudimentary software that puts prose into a screenplay format, which was useful in adapting his two novels for the screen. The screenplay for “Second Marriage” is being rewritten, and “Tracer” is close to being filmed.

Literature appears to run in the Barthelme family. His mother was a high school English teacher, and four of Barthelme’s five siblings write fiction. The fifth, his only sister, is a press spokeswoman for J. Hugh Liedtke, the chairman of Pennzoil.

Barthelme is a perfectionist, according to Rie Fortenberry, a friend who helps him edit the Mississippi Review, and for all the apparent randomness of his stories, Barthelme insists that his characters “do not act without cause, motive or thought.”

But he is more dramatist than storyteller, and causes are displayed rather than recited. “I like to leave a lot of room for the reader to operate,” he says.