I just finished reading Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme and I an feeling a bit off kilter.  His stories can do that to a reader, as they are off kilter themselves, swinging from absurdity to profundity and back again, coming across nice and simple with a straightforward narrative and fully-realized characters and then turning logic upside down, creating stories that have the sense of a long dream (or nightmare) and are populated with whiz-bang bizarro personalities.

I prefer the straightforward in short stories and music. When it comes to Art (paintings, sculptures) or novels or film I can take strangely-placed objects, nonsensical lines or complex and non-linear over-layering of ideas; I like illogical sequences and the struggle to find meaning in paragraphs of hidden wisdom.  But in the short story I like the characters somewhat real and fleshed out, the landscape recognizable, and the struggle defined.

So there were some stories in this collection that I just loved, stories told with humor, stories built on well-placed details of character, place, and thing (struggle).  From the first story, “Chablis”:  “My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time.  I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it.  But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says.  This may be true.  The baby is very close to my wife.  They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly.  I ask the baby, who is a girl, ‘Whose girl are you?  Are you Daddy’s girl?’  The baby says, ‘Momma momma momma.’  I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.“   This is a brilliant piece of writing, conveying so much in just a few sentences, and being funny at the same time, and catching that true moment –baby and mother clutching each other — that we see everyday.  Barthleme sees mountains of meaning in that clutching, and he’s right.

Another story, “Jaws”, a little nuttier but still a fairly straightforward narrative of he problems between a man and his wife and the observer who is drawn into their problems, ends with absolute wisdom:  “I don’t believe that we are what we do, although many thinkers argue otherwise.  I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are — an imperfect manifestation of a much better tonality.  Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.“  This in response to the woman biting into a tendon of her husband and rendering him limp-ridden for life: bizarre but Barthelme finds the truth.

The wonderful story, “Lightning”, has the narrator writing a magazine piece on people who have been struck by lightning.  He finds that each victim was changed by the near-death and electrifying experience:  “Lightning [is] an attempt at music on the part of God? …. Lightning at once a coup de theatre and career counseling?“  Makes me almost want to go out in the next thunderstorm, waving a metal rod and screaming for advice!

Despite my penchant for more traditional narrative in short stories, one of my favorite stories in this Barthelme collection is “Overnight to Many Distant Cities.”  This story is beautiful and strange and whimsical and slightly threatening.  Most of all it is a wonderful elegy to all the places on earth that can be visited and remembered, and possessed through holding the memory always.  People come and go, but cities and memories (the cities that we build) are forever.

No matter what you like in a short story (unless it is length — his stories really are short) you will find a story to fit your mood and taste in Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme, and you can be sure the writing is good, the truth is there, and the end is near.