“As succeeding waves of writers established themselves, the literary landscape they were shaping often seemed not to make very much sense, a fact of which John Hughes is clearly cognizant, for his effort in this study of the minimalist fiction of Frederick Barthelme is in part to make sense of the evolution of style and convention in American literature and, at the same time, to consider the subject matter by which the literature makes itself known. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students general readers." - CHOICE "This study will be most useful to newcomers to Barthelme. The purpose of this study is to review the criticism surrounding Barthelme’s fiction and to engage in a closer reading of Barthelme’s texts in order to see beyond the highly engaging surface of the prose to the interrogation of contemporary morality in which Barthelme is engaged. Particularly, he shows how people negotiate sexual relationships and marriage following the sexual revolution of the sixties and the women’s movement of the seventies. Not interrogating and establishing “codes” of behavior by which people might live (as Hemingway did), Barthelme demonstrates how people do live in the postmodern age, an age which no longer enjoys a grand narrative or a religious underpinning.
Barthelme is best read as a contemporary moralist, not of the prescriptive type, but of the descriptive type.
The minimalism that is the hallmark of Barthelme’s style, in fact, invites a reading of the stories and novels beyond just the accuracy of description, the precision of imagery, and the economy of language. Critics have generally categorized Frederick Barthelme as a minimalist, meaning for some a writer who caught the tide of a reaction to the metafiction that dominated literary production in the sixties and much of the seventies, and for others a writer who had nothing to say beyond the surface of the prose.
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