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The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories
Twenty years ago Frederick Barthelme began publishing stories that turned readers' expectations on their heads. In The New Yorker , Esquire , GQ , and elsewhere he published story after story that confounded the prevailing literary assumptions, treating our very ordinary lives with a new kind of careful and loving attention and imagination. He wrote intimate, funny, odd, detailed, laugh-out-loud stories about relationships that almost happen and ones that almost don't, about the ways we look at each other when we mean things we cannot bring ourselves to say.
Before there were slackers, or kids in parking lots, or stories that took the mundane seriously, there were these prescient stories by Frederick Barthelme. He took a post-ironic stance before the post-ironic had a name. He took fiction where few were then willing to go, took as his subject small romances, private fears, suburban estrangement, office angst, cultural isolation, apparently insignificant humiliations, and the growing information surplus (CNN is a sociological novel, he once remarked). He wrote--and continues to write--with a laser-surgery precision that stuns and delights both readers and critics. If he arrived at the new-literature party a little earlier than the other guests, he has not left early, and is thus well represented in The Law of Averages , with old and new stories side by side, ready to give up their abundant pleasures.
Before there were slackers, or kids in parking lots, or stories that took the mundane seriously, there were these prescient stories by Frederick Barthelme. He took a post-ironic stance before the post-ironic had a name. He took fiction where few were then willing to go, took as his subject small romances, private fears, suburban estrangement, office angst, cultural isolation, apparently insignificant humiliations, and the growing information surplus (CNN is a sociological novel, he once remarked). He wrote--and continues to write--with a laser-surgery precision that stuns and delights both readers and critics. If he arrived at the new-literature party a little earlier than the other guests, he has not left early, and is thus well represented in The Law of Averages , with old and new stories side by side, ready to give up their abundant pleasures.
384 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 2000
About the author
Frederick Barthelme
49 books84 followersBarthelme's works are known for their focus on the landscape of the New South. Along with his reputation as a minimalist, together with writers Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison, Barthelme's work has also been described by terms such as "dirty realism" and "K-mart realism."He published his first short story in The New Yorker,and has claimed that a rotisserie chicken helped him understand that he needed to write about ordinary people.He has moved away from the postmodern stylings of his older brother, Donald Barthelme, though his brother's influence can be seen in his earliest works, Rangoon and War and War.
Barthelme was thirty-three year editor and visionary of Mississippi Review, known for recognizing and publishing once new talents such as Larry Brown, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Amy Hempel early in their careers.
Barthelme was thirty-three year editor and visionary of Mississippi Review, known for recognizing and publishing once new talents such as Larry Brown, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Amy Hempel early in their careers.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 13, 2014
Frederick Barthelme is the good stuff. Reading his fiction is like smoking a fat joint with good friends, or having a few beers on a hot early evening, or a sleep-in after five days of early mornings. His prose is simple and his characters are usually of average intelligence or lack insight, but he manages somehow to see the infinite complexity in all this, in the modern-suburban life, in the beauty of an empty car-park late at night, in the law of averages, I guess.
The stories in this collection are stylistically-influenced but wholly original. They read like a modernised Raymond Carver and maybe feel a little pre-Tao Lin, but the Barthelmeian thing is this beautiful optimism about the mundane nature of living. He's able to capture those moments that feel like a pause in time, when you might be walking through your neighbourhood you've seen a hundred times, just trying to get home, when, as if out of nowhere, you become aware of the fact that you're alive, on this earth, with all these other people who are living their own individual lives in their own houses, and it's like this overwhelming sense of gratitude for being here, able to acknowledge and appreciate that. Like, for instance, this little gem from "Driver":
"She looked terrific in the car. She had on a checked shirt open over a white Danskin, her feet were up on the dash, and her short hair was wet and rippled with the wind. Her skin was olive and rough, and it was glowing as if she were in front of a fire. When I missed a light next to Pfeiffer Chemicals, a couple of acres of pipes and ladders and vats and winking green lamps, I leaned over to kiss her cheek, but she turned at the last minute and caught me with her lips." p.131.
Also, he writes women like nobody's business.
Of course, the collection isn't perfect. In fact it pretty clearly illustrates where Barthelme is strong and where he's weak. He's strong when he writes from a first-person male perspective, usually an older male who's somewhat educated, a little disinterested with life, but with an inarticulate yearning for something more. He's weak when he doesn't do this. Some of the stories are written from a second-person perspective and these work okay, but they feel a little pointless. "Shopgirls" is a nice idea, but it's hard to tell if Barthelme has a point or he's just trying to be a little experimentally fancy and show-off-y. And he certainly proves with "The Autobiography of Rita Jay" that he should stay very far away from the perspective of a female character. He's brilliant when he observes a woman, but he can't get inside her head.
Anyway, readers interested in Barthelme might need a checklist of reading pre-requisites, so I'll make it easy by spelling it out right here:
You best not be concerned with plot, because in Barthelme's world, going for a drive is about as plot-heavy as it gets.
Helps if you're sympathetic to the plight of the common person, because there are no extraordinary heroes here.
Don't expect to take sides. You might not like, or even find interesting, the main character (Barthelme doesn't shy from writing from the perspective of a pedophile), so just go with it, because everybody has some story to tell.
Don't come to Barthelme looking for outlandish settings in far-away lands. This is Southern American suburbia, and it could (if that isn't where you are) just as easily be your neighbourhood, starring your next door neighbour.
Point is, when Barthelme is good, he's very, very good. He expresses something plenty of authors wouldn't even consider worth looking at, because it might seem "boring" or "pointless". But he manages to look at what most of us glaze over, with a curious and careful eye. What he sees and records feels all the more beautiful because you realise, up until now, you've missed it every time it's been right in front of you.
"Ray opened his mouth to repeat himself, then laughed. 'It's a great life, isn't it? It's much better than anything I imagined, or anything I did before. ' He was making hand gestures, slicing at the air as if cutting away underbrush. 'With my first marriage and my second - I didn't have a clue. You get married, have a baby, you have a car, have a job, and everything just gets away from you, lickety-split.' Then he put an arm around Judy's shoulders, tugged her toward him. 'Now everything's a lot better. You want something, you take it. That's how we go - bip, bip, bip.'" p. 205
The stories in this collection are stylistically-influenced but wholly original. They read like a modernised Raymond Carver and maybe feel a little pre-Tao Lin, but the Barthelmeian thing is this beautiful optimism about the mundane nature of living. He's able to capture those moments that feel like a pause in time, when you might be walking through your neighbourhood you've seen a hundred times, just trying to get home, when, as if out of nowhere, you become aware of the fact that you're alive, on this earth, with all these other people who are living their own individual lives in their own houses, and it's like this overwhelming sense of gratitude for being here, able to acknowledge and appreciate that. Like, for instance, this little gem from "Driver":
"She looked terrific in the car. She had on a checked shirt open over a white Danskin, her feet were up on the dash, and her short hair was wet and rippled with the wind. Her skin was olive and rough, and it was glowing as if she were in front of a fire. When I missed a light next to Pfeiffer Chemicals, a couple of acres of pipes and ladders and vats and winking green lamps, I leaned over to kiss her cheek, but she turned at the last minute and caught me with her lips." p.131.
Also, he writes women like nobody's business.
Of course, the collection isn't perfect. In fact it pretty clearly illustrates where Barthelme is strong and where he's weak. He's strong when he writes from a first-person male perspective, usually an older male who's somewhat educated, a little disinterested with life, but with an inarticulate yearning for something more. He's weak when he doesn't do this. Some of the stories are written from a second-person perspective and these work okay, but they feel a little pointless. "Shopgirls" is a nice idea, but it's hard to tell if Barthelme has a point or he's just trying to be a little experimentally fancy and show-off-y. And he certainly proves with "The Autobiography of Rita Jay" that he should stay very far away from the perspective of a female character. He's brilliant when he observes a woman, but he can't get inside her head.
Anyway, readers interested in Barthelme might need a checklist of reading pre-requisites, so I'll make it easy by spelling it out right here:
You best not be concerned with plot, because in Barthelme's world, going for a drive is about as plot-heavy as it gets.
Helps if you're sympathetic to the plight of the common person, because there are no extraordinary heroes here.
Don't expect to take sides. You might not like, or even find interesting, the main character (Barthelme doesn't shy from writing from the perspective of a pedophile), so just go with it, because everybody has some story to tell.
Don't come to Barthelme looking for outlandish settings in far-away lands. This is Southern American suburbia, and it could (if that isn't where you are) just as easily be your neighbourhood, starring your next door neighbour.
Point is, when Barthelme is good, he's very, very good. He expresses something plenty of authors wouldn't even consider worth looking at, because it might seem "boring" or "pointless". But he manages to look at what most of us glaze over, with a curious and careful eye. What he sees and records feels all the more beautiful because you realise, up until now, you've missed it every time it's been right in front of you.
"Ray opened his mouth to repeat himself, then laughed. 'It's a great life, isn't it? It's much better than anything I imagined, or anything I did before. ' He was making hand gestures, slicing at the air as if cutting away underbrush. 'With my first marriage and my second - I didn't have a clue. You get married, have a baby, you have a car, have a job, and everything just gets away from you, lickety-split.' Then he put an arm around Judy's shoulders, tugged her toward him. 'Now everything's a lot better. You want something, you take it. That's how we go - bip, bip, bip.'" p. 205
Read
May 20, 2017Barthelme advises young writers in a snarky list of 39 items I gather circulated in MFAs like Daniel Clowes' art school confidential comics, "Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don’t mean so much."
He isn't so successful at this in his short stories as he is in his novels, because the more reserved and brief an utterance is the more compelled we are to interpret it. The effect of his narrator, a passive male or somebody making the occasional casual but striking comment at very clear video footage of a passive male, is somebody being coy with us. That is, until we understand that here, oddly, is somebody who is saying nearly all of what he wants us to know. We are so used to evasions, euphemisms, elegant constructions, theories, games, that we are disarmed by an inhumanly human voice. Compare another New Yorker writer who takes ordinary people as his subject matter with Barthelme.
Stamm: "The corkscrew was shaped like a girl in a pleated frock, of the sort that Lara knew from childhood photographs of her mother, a short, light-green summer dress. Only the red collar didn’t really fit; it should have been embroidered tulle, and white. Lara could see the pictures—big family get-togethers in a garden in the north of Italy, full of people she didn’t know. Even her mother didn’t know all their names. 'That man was a neighbor—what was his name again? And aren’t those my mother’s cousin Alberto’s children? Graziella, Alfina, and what was the little one called? Antonio? Tonino?' The colors were faded, which made them somehow more garish. It was as though the photographs had captured the sun, the sun of childhood, pale and ever-present. Thereafter the family had fallen apart, and people had gone their separate ways. When Lara had visited Italy with her parents, there hadn’t been any more big reunions, only afternoons spent in darkened homes with old people who smelled funny and served dry cookies and big plastic bottles of lukewarm Fanta. "
Barthelme: "Rita says the living-room lights keep her awake when she goes to bed before I do, which is most of the time. The light comes down the hall and under the bedroom door, she says, and in the dark it's like a laser. So on Sunday, after she'd gone to bed, I started to read Money in semidarkness, tilting the pages to get the light from a book lamp clipped onto the magazine. That didn't work, so I gave it up and watched a TV program about low riders in San Diego. They put special suspensions in their cars so they can bounce them up and down. That's not all they do, but it's sort of the center of things for them. I'd seen the cars before, seen pictures of them jumping - a wonderful thing, just on its own merits. I watched the whole show. It lasted half an hour, and ended with a parade of these wobbling, hopping, jerking cars creeping down a tree-lined California street with a tinkly Mexican love song in the background, and when it was done I had tears in my eyes because I wasn't driving one of the cars. I muted the sound, sat in the dark, and imagined flirting with a pretty Latin girl in a short, tight, shiny dress with a red belt slung waist to hip, her cleavage perfect and brown, on a hot summer night with a breeze, on a glittering street, with the smell of gasoline and Armor All in the air, oak leaves rattling over the thump of the car engine, and me slouched at the wheel of a violet Mercury, ready to pop the front end for a smile."
In both there is the immediate presentation of the object of desire, but in one we can immediately feel a symbol being formed, the roots of desire being traced deeply. The corkscrew collects all possible significance. (This is done deftly, naturally, relying on Laura, which is why I also like Stamm.) In Barthelme the car does not. The motive is even eventually supplied, but it is not a motive that collects the entire characters being, from the cradle to that moment.
This straightforwardness is why I like Barthelme. There is an underlying kindness to it. He thinks the contemporary world, even in all its tackiness, and the people in his stories just as they are, not even as histories, are interesting enough on their own. It is a great humanistic gesture. And if you are willing to go along for the ride, it can be fun in the way literature (and this is literature[1]) is rarely fun. Barthelme's stories are full of overlooked intimacies, pleasures, appeal - and their overlooked opposites, which give the pleasure to the sensitively interested.
If you'll indulge me in some literary chatter, I think he has a very strong relation to Beckett, his older brother's literary father, who, significantly, the younger Barthelme regards as a mentor. In Beckett's work there is an almost active frustration of the interpretive faculty of the reader. (Out of this the older brother develops his collage technique.) Beckett's characters are dissolving characters in dissolving or even absurd lives. Our relation to them terrifies us. They refuse to be understood as anything other than nakedly what they are, shambling need.
In Barthelme there's room left for the reader to approach it for more, for politics[2], and all other headiness, but Barthelme's characters are just intact people, in mostly normal lives, doing what they do. They are sometimes thrust into some implausible encounter or situation, usually vaguely sexual, but they do not work themselves up into Lear, into some defining choice. We are just kept interested, and reminded that things do indeed get very strange. Interpretation isn't really courted by omission like it is in Hemingway. Barthelme's characters too are naked, but their nakedness is no horror.
[1] It is easy for pornography or genre work to lack pretension in the same way because it can be shorn of everything but the stimulating materials. 'Literature,' or properly speaking literature of the representative kind becomes genre material as it approaches the tropes, etc, of the genre of drama. There are works of literature that are genre work without genres, and these are precious, as they are unsullied springs with an unusual but pure taste.
[2] Think of how much can be done with that opening passage. Barthelme himself isn't unaware of his work's political implications, but his stories are still aggressively about the personal sphere. If we get politics at all it is through what is selected, not through a conspicuous presentation.
He isn't so successful at this in his short stories as he is in his novels, because the more reserved and brief an utterance is the more compelled we are to interpret it. The effect of his narrator, a passive male or somebody making the occasional casual but striking comment at very clear video footage of a passive male, is somebody being coy with us. That is, until we understand that here, oddly, is somebody who is saying nearly all of what he wants us to know. We are so used to evasions, euphemisms, elegant constructions, theories, games, that we are disarmed by an inhumanly human voice. Compare another New Yorker writer who takes ordinary people as his subject matter with Barthelme.
Stamm: "The corkscrew was shaped like a girl in a pleated frock, of the sort that Lara knew from childhood photographs of her mother, a short, light-green summer dress. Only the red collar didn’t really fit; it should have been embroidered tulle, and white. Lara could see the pictures—big family get-togethers in a garden in the north of Italy, full of people she didn’t know. Even her mother didn’t know all their names. 'That man was a neighbor—what was his name again? And aren’t those my mother’s cousin Alberto’s children? Graziella, Alfina, and what was the little one called? Antonio? Tonino?' The colors were faded, which made them somehow more garish. It was as though the photographs had captured the sun, the sun of childhood, pale and ever-present. Thereafter the family had fallen apart, and people had gone their separate ways. When Lara had visited Italy with her parents, there hadn’t been any more big reunions, only afternoons spent in darkened homes with old people who smelled funny and served dry cookies and big plastic bottles of lukewarm Fanta. "
Barthelme: "Rita says the living-room lights keep her awake when she goes to bed before I do, which is most of the time. The light comes down the hall and under the bedroom door, she says, and in the dark it's like a laser. So on Sunday, after she'd gone to bed, I started to read Money in semidarkness, tilting the pages to get the light from a book lamp clipped onto the magazine. That didn't work, so I gave it up and watched a TV program about low riders in San Diego. They put special suspensions in their cars so they can bounce them up and down. That's not all they do, but it's sort of the center of things for them. I'd seen the cars before, seen pictures of them jumping - a wonderful thing, just on its own merits. I watched the whole show. It lasted half an hour, and ended with a parade of these wobbling, hopping, jerking cars creeping down a tree-lined California street with a tinkly Mexican love song in the background, and when it was done I had tears in my eyes because I wasn't driving one of the cars. I muted the sound, sat in the dark, and imagined flirting with a pretty Latin girl in a short, tight, shiny dress with a red belt slung waist to hip, her cleavage perfect and brown, on a hot summer night with a breeze, on a glittering street, with the smell of gasoline and Armor All in the air, oak leaves rattling over the thump of the car engine, and me slouched at the wheel of a violet Mercury, ready to pop the front end for a smile."
In both there is the immediate presentation of the object of desire, but in one we can immediately feel a symbol being formed, the roots of desire being traced deeply. The corkscrew collects all possible significance. (This is done deftly, naturally, relying on Laura, which is why I also like Stamm.) In Barthelme the car does not. The motive is even eventually supplied, but it is not a motive that collects the entire characters being, from the cradle to that moment.
This straightforwardness is why I like Barthelme. There is an underlying kindness to it. He thinks the contemporary world, even in all its tackiness, and the people in his stories just as they are, not even as histories, are interesting enough on their own. It is a great humanistic gesture. And if you are willing to go along for the ride, it can be fun in the way literature (and this is literature[1]) is rarely fun. Barthelme's stories are full of overlooked intimacies, pleasures, appeal - and their overlooked opposites, which give the pleasure to the sensitively interested.
If you'll indulge me in some literary chatter, I think he has a very strong relation to Beckett, his older brother's literary father, who, significantly, the younger Barthelme regards as a mentor. In Beckett's work there is an almost active frustration of the interpretive faculty of the reader. (Out of this the older brother develops his collage technique.) Beckett's characters are dissolving characters in dissolving or even absurd lives. Our relation to them terrifies us. They refuse to be understood as anything other than nakedly what they are, shambling need.
In Barthelme there's room left for the reader to approach it for more, for politics[2], and all other headiness, but Barthelme's characters are just intact people, in mostly normal lives, doing what they do. They are sometimes thrust into some implausible encounter or situation, usually vaguely sexual, but they do not work themselves up into Lear, into some defining choice. We are just kept interested, and reminded that things do indeed get very strange. Interpretation isn't really courted by omission like it is in Hemingway. Barthelme's characters too are naked, but their nakedness is no horror.
[1] It is easy for pornography or genre work to lack pretension in the same way because it can be shorn of everything but the stimulating materials. 'Literature,' or properly speaking literature of the representative kind becomes genre material as it approaches the tropes, etc, of the genre of drama. There are works of literature that are genre work without genres, and these are precious, as they are unsullied springs with an unusual but pure taste.
[2] Think of how much can be done with that opening passage. Barthelme himself isn't unaware of his work's political implications, but his stories are still aggressively about the personal sphere. If we get politics at all it is through what is selected, not through a conspicuous presentation.
July 27, 2011
There's something strange and magical about these simple stories. Like an optimistic Raymond Carver, Barthelme spins tales and characters out of simple, raw material, attempting to chronicle the weirdness, the passivity and the gorgeousness of our bizaare time. Nothing at all like the more experimental Donald B. (his brother), his sincere and insightful chronicles of the emotional life of postmodern men and women at crossroads of various types really resonates.
December 31, 2009
I finished the second and third story last night.I found the second one,"Pool Lights," unbelieavably boring, while I enjoyed the third,"Domestic," a lot.So far Barthelme is batting .333; good for baseball player's, but not so good for writers.
From what I've heard and read about Barthelme, his notoriety comes from his decision to write about the mundane; kind of like a literary Seinfeld,with its focus on "nothing." I loved Seinfeld,but I find that kind of literature hopelessly boring. I think a child with a crayon could do a decent job of describing his/her day. So what? As for me, I care not a bit about learning in exaggerated detail about the intricacies of getting dressed or meeting a group of neighbors at a condo pool("Pool Lights".)
"Domestic,"is different.I'm guessing this one is Barthelme at his best. It's one of those stories that comes at you out of left field...quirky, odd.The plot( if you can call it such) revolves around a husband who finds meaning in digging a giant hole in his backyard, and his wife who is disturbed by it to the point of it nearly ruining their eight year marriage.The ending is cleverly, if somewhat predictably, done.
Granted Barthelme has found a niche that distinguishes him from those writer's who write about important things(his words). Still, I doubt this type of writing will stand the test of time. Great literature should do more than merely amuse.
From what I've heard and read about Barthelme, his notoriety comes from his decision to write about the mundane; kind of like a literary Seinfeld,with its focus on "nothing." I loved Seinfeld,but I find that kind of literature hopelessly boring. I think a child with a crayon could do a decent job of describing his/her day. So what? As for me, I care not a bit about learning in exaggerated detail about the intricacies of getting dressed or meeting a group of neighbors at a condo pool("Pool Lights".)
"Domestic,"is different.I'm guessing this one is Barthelme at his best. It's one of those stories that comes at you out of left field...quirky, odd.The plot( if you can call it such) revolves around a husband who finds meaning in digging a giant hole in his backyard, and his wife who is disturbed by it to the point of it nearly ruining their eight year marriage.The ending is cleverly, if somewhat predictably, done.
Granted Barthelme has found a niche that distinguishes him from those writer's who write about important things(his words). Still, I doubt this type of writing will stand the test of time. Great literature should do more than merely amuse.
Want to Read
January 11, 2021#1.6
The waitress brushed her hip against me. I ordered a Stroh's and then listened to two of the women talk about a guy both had in class. Mitch sat down and put an arm around Jack. Hacker rubbed his nose in tight circles with his knuckle. "I hear you are interviewing. How'd you do?" he said.
#4.3
"I've got a story about a four-hundred-twenty-pound man on death row in Minnesota who can't be hanged because it would be a cruel and unusual punishment to rip his head off his neck with a rope, which is what his lawyers say will happen if the state tries to hang him."
The waitress brushed her hip against me. I ordered a Stroh's and then listened to two of the women talk about a guy both had in class. Mitch sat down and put an arm around Jack. Hacker rubbed his nose in tight circles with his knuckle. "I hear you are interviewing. How'd you do?" he said.
#4.3
"I've got a story about a four-hundred-twenty-pound man on death row in Minnesota who can't be hanged because it would be a cruel and unusual punishment to rip his head off his neck with a rope, which is what his lawyers say will happen if the state tries to hang him."
June 23, 2007
Too modern for me.
May 8, 2020
The stories are in chronological order and they start out pretty bro-y. They get better. I most appreciated a feeling of mid-income white kind of life on the gulf coast in these years. I did feel it. I think my favorite story was the couple on the road trip with their friends and they stay at a little motel with cabins, and they chat with a guy walking his pet duck on a leash... yeah that one.
February 1, 2016
these stories taken from 'not my idea' ; nobody left to tell' ; 'students of history' ; 'talking with others' ; 'cut on the bias'. as noted above, there is a lazer quality to barthelme writing and style, economy, focused. i'd also say they are modern, sexy, smart. too.
October 26, 2010
This is why philistines should not be allowed to give books as gifts...
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