“Edward was explaining to Carl about margins.”
This collection includes “The School” which along with “I Bought a Little City” (also in this collection) is worth the price of admission for me. That story includes one of the most subtly devastating lines in all of literature: “We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.” In a previous review about one of Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White, I talked about how it wasn’t much like a lot of his stories, and while I think that’s true, I wasn’t completely sure what I meant by that because I still didn’t quite know what I meant by that. The introduction to this book helped me sort this out by mentioning the different Donald Barthelmes you’ll find in his writing. What didn’t work for me about the novel is a) I don’t like all of those different versions equally and b) that book was likely one of those ones I don’t like as well as the others.
This story collection, which is more of a compendium, has all of them in one place. Not all the stories, but all of the Donalds, some of whom are my favorite writers. A lot of his writing is about stripping bare the fat of conventional ideas and either representing them stripped bare or sometimes only putting the fat up there. What you get in other of the stories is a familiar story, slightly aslant versions. They’re not quite what you get from Lydia Davis stories, but you don’t really get Lydia Davis without Donald Barthelme (and Grace Paley), and not quite George Saunders, but you don’t get George Saunders without Donald Barthelme.
