The bard of Biloxi Frederick Barthelme’s deep surfaces BY JON GARELICK
	Elroy Nights By Frederick Barthelme. Counterpoint, 234 pages, $24.
	Barthelme at home   For years, Frederick Barthelme lived under the shadow of his older brother Donald, who mentored both him and their brother Steven (Donald died of cancer in 1989). And when the elder Barthelme’s editors at the New Yorker rejected Frederick’s work, it was because it "sounded too much like Don." Barthelme has described his writing epiphany — the realization that led to the discovery of his own voice — in a couple of ways. In an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, he says it came as he was driving the famous 20-mile bridge where I-10 crosses the Atchafalaya swamp in south-central Louisiana. But in the introduction to his collection The Law of Averages (2000), he says it came as he was eating a piece of supermarket barbecued chicken. "I was thrilled at how wonderful and grotesque this prefab, plastic-wrapped, aluminum-panned, shrinking, falling-apart, sweet-smelling chicken was. Somehow it was the culture." It’s that kind of moment that Barthelme still seeks, and says he’s content to seek, in his fiction. "I don’t want to have my characters standing on soapboxes leading the charge against X, Y, or Z," he explains with a soft Texas drawl over the phone from Hattiesburg. "I think if we’re honest about it, that ‘narrow spectrum’ is more about our lives than a lot of work that’s just a chest-pounding, strident, elaborate kind of erector-set version of futurism. For example, I’m not a [Don] DeLillo fan. He just seems to me a joke. Excuse me, but haven’t we all thought of this, and thought of this? I’m not interested in the kind of dramatic version of sociology that some people seem to want to write about. The character who is a signpost for a set of ideas — whatever the set of ideas might be — is only a signpost, and you might as well just put the signpost there and save me the trouble of having to extrapolate it out of the character. Or the character becomes part of an argument somebody wants to make. I’m not interested in making arguments. I’m more interested in, ‘Let’s hang out with this person and see how he makes up his life, what decisions he makes, what he thinks about them, how those relate to how we think about some things that are similar in our lives.’ " Nonetheless, readers do look for signposts in Barthelme’s work, and they get frustrated by the apparent arbitrary nature of his plots. "People in the review world have talked about the degree to which the road trip in Elroy Nights seemed a jump cut in the structure. People get upset because they think it means a certain thing. But for me, it’s a group of people in close proximity interacting with each other, and then you get to run them into different sets of circumstances. In this case we have a robbery, the ongoing affair, the stepdaughter coupling with another character, we have a sex scene. You can do a lot of things very quickly that allow you to explore the characters in a way that might not be so easy to do if there were some overarching plot that was driving things instead. It’s just a slightly different choice of motive and structure that I think other people have different ideas about. One of the delightful pre-publication reviews characterized the robbery scene as a ‘hackneyed robbery.’ I read this and turned to my spouse and said, ‘Wait a minute: this was funny, wasn’t it?’ " — JG

It’s been 20 years since Frederick Barthelme published his first official book of fiction, the short-story collection Moon Deluxe. In those days, he was part of an ad hoc movement identified as minimalism that also happened to signal a "renaissance" in the short story. Included in this loosely defined group were Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Robison, and tangential fellow travelers like Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. The style was descended from the most stripped-down of early Hemingway, with everything conveyed by surfaces: gestures, dialogue, physical description. There was no narrative commentary to guide the reader to greater meanings, only the poetic juxtaposition of all those surfaces, and the rhythms of contemporary speech that had been absorbed into the prose.

The style was startling and fresh. But for every critic who hailed Carver as a "master" (Irving Howe), there were more who decried the new wave in fiction as anemic and unsustaining. Probably the most hefty broadside came from novelist Madison Smartt Bell in an essay in Harper’s called "Less Is Less: The Dwindling American Short Story." At one point, Barthelme even wrote his own comic mea culpa for the New York Times Book Review: "Convicted Miminalist Spills Bean."

Now Barthelme has given us the novel Elroy Nights, his tenth book of fiction since Moon Deluxe, and it has all the earmarks of his earlier work. A native of Houston (he’s a younger brother of the late short-story writer and novelist Donald Barthelme), he has for years taught at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. To its detractors, minimalism was supposed to be about the flattening of all affect, the characters speaking in a kind of bargain-basement reduced vocabulary, settings as indistinguishable as the interchangeable mini-marketplaces of malled-up America.

But Barthelme is a distinctly regional writer. He likes long road trips, and to read his work is to traverse the Gulf Coast along Interstate 10 from Biloxi to Houston again and again. To be sure, he still likes the same beachfront steak-and-seafood joints and apartment complexes lit by pool lights. But he’s just as infatuated by the particulars each of these places conjures — the eponymous manager of Smokey’s barbecue restaurant in Two Against One (1988), or Mrs. Scree, an apartment-complex manager who first appeared in "Pool Lights" in Moon Deluxe and reappears in Elroy Nights managing the Windswept condominium complex in Biloxi. He individuates his landscapes with the voices of his characters, as well as with the reassuring click of place names along those highway routes: Biloxi, D’Iberville, Gulfport, Pascagoula. And then there’s the look and sound and feel of these places, the way the jets from Keesler Air Force Base seem to "scoot up out of nowhere and roar off due south over the Gulf" as the protagonist in Elroy Nights relaxes on his deck.

Besides taking note of their surroundings, Barthelme inundates his characters with the buzz of the media-saturated world. His protagonists rant and complain, watch too much CNN, get sucked into the Web. Mississippi’s legalization of offshore gambling in the mid ’90s gave Barthelme’s fiction a jolt, as his characters found their way to the casinos. The funny and frightening novel Bob the Gambler (1997) was one result. Its real-life counterpart was the memoir Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss (1999), where Barthelme and his younger brother Steven chronicled an addiction in which they gambled away their $250,000 inheritance and wound up indicted for gambling fraud (i.e., cheating), though the charges were later dropped by the DA.

Of course, minimalists aren’t supposed to write something as hoary and Dostoyevskian as a gambling novel, but that’s only one way in which Barthelme has defied the critics. He didn’t publish his first New Yorker story until the age of 38 (he’s 60 now), but he moved into middle age fast. Middle-aged torpor is the place where his characters spend their time; at the beginning of The Brothers (1993), the 44-year-old protagonist is already obsessing about turning 50.

Elroy Nights is not atypical: Elroy, an art professor at Dry River University, is separating from his wife by mutual agreement, as a way "to get some space into the marriage, some room to maneuver. . . . With everything else going on — terrorists, war, guys with nine-year-olds buried in their back yards — our problems seemed slight, even to us. But they were ours, which counted for something." He concludes: "There wasn’t any life and death reason we had to be in the same house, under the same roof."

Barthelme’s fiction is rich in incident, but it’s episodic rather than plot-driven. The characters in Painted Desert went on a manic tour of the Southwest, from Dealey Plaza to the deserts. And Bob the Gambler was, of course, full of all that sweaty gambling. Almost always there’s an undercurrent of domestic strife, a low-grade fever of coupling, uncoupling, and recoupling. Elroy moves into the Windswept condo, has an affair with one of his stepdaughter’s friends (a typically wised-up Barthelme female called Freddie). There’s an off-stage suicide and a comic gas-station/convenience-store robbery run amok, with shots fired and two victims down (but no deaths). There’s a road trip up to Memphis, then out to Dallas and back.

Even for a Barthelme novel, Elroy Nights is on the ruminative side. But like other Barthelme novels, it’s also funny and poignant. And as you’d expect, there’s no easy moralizing about the affair with Freddie; it’s a just another way in which Elroy is measured against his students’ generation, his daughter’s generation. A student’s suicide brings mortality into even deeper relief.

Barthelme’s novels are full of wise-ass remarks, but they’re also rich in Flaubertian descriptive details, the Flaubert rule being that, in the words of the critics Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, "no object exists until it has acted upon or been acted upon by some other object." This necessitates all five senses’ being engaged constantly, and Barthelme is, yes, a master of sensory detail. It accounts for some of his most exquisite writing. Sometimes that description is put in the service of suspense, as in Bob the Gambler, when the protagonist, reflecting for a moment in the Mississippi night air outside a dockside casino, contemplates his next move. Natural Selection (1990) ends with a sustained, dreamlike passage about a car wreck — all the more dreamlike for its detail. In an extended passage near the end of Elroy Nights, Elroy remembers his childhood, and Barthelme’s rhythms, his choice of objects, of sensory detail, accrues with an elegiac bitter sweetness. "I loved the gritty feel of my father’s chin, the way his eyes looked behind his rimless glasses, shining and strong, and the sound of his footsteps on the polished hardwood floors as he went to the hall mirror to tie his tie each morning. I loved his starched white shirts." As Gordon and Tate might say, we see that starched shirt because we hear those footsteps.

It’s these moments that redeem Barthelme’s characters, save them from the media glut, allow them their full engagement with life and their acts of kindness. Elroy offers condolences to his suicide student’s father, telling us, "These things that we said to each other seemed grotesque, not because they were untrue, but because they were so far from being the full truth." In his details and gestures, Barthelme reclaims life from the grotesque, feeling from sentimentality. At the end of the novel, Elroy Nights’s life hasn’t become any easier, but he’s wholly in it, expectant. In his "minimal" gestures, Barthelme has given us a good measure of the full truth.