Experimentation with the "absurd," both in theme and teique, is by no means a totally new development in literature, especially for those readers familiar with the works of Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Genêt, and Robbe-Grillet. Like these writers, Mr. Barthelme satirizes and mimics most of the clichés of our popular culture, and, through the predits of his characters, makes the reader ask "Why?" Yet these predits, although bizarre, inane, and usually surrealistic, do not necessarily tain the morose otations of most writers of the absurd. For example, iale the narrator is thirty-five years old, six feet tall, with the logid reasoning of an adult. He is in the sixth grade, where Miss Mandible, his teacher, is frustrated in her desires to have an affair with him because, officially, he is a child!
These imaginative stories of dark humor, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, are to be interpreted on many levels, and offer refreshing and thhly exg reading.
". . .at long last, for better or for worse, the Absurd has in these pages beeed precisely with the Goofy. Hardly one of the 14 stories ends without a wry twist proclaiming that even its metaphysical protest has been all in fun." -- The New York Times
". . . Barthelme mao evoke the kind of thoughtful laughter he is looking for, the kind of astonishment that is a stimulant. He has created certain effects that seem to be new ierature of the absurd, and this gives him importance as an experimentalist." -- Granville Hicks, Saturday Review
Donald Barthelme is a thirty-two-year-old Texan now living in New York City. He has worked as a neer reporter, a magazior, and a museum director, and served in the Army in Korea and Japan. He is currently managior of the art-literary review, Location, and is at work on a novel. His fi has appeared in The New Yorker, taew World Writing, Harpers Bazaar, and azines.