APF

tier stories of a sort, while the remainder as collected in this new volume unfortunately must be
counted as Barthelme’s least essential efforts. If this is not the impression that Barthelme, and
now the editor of Flying to America, Kim Herzinger, wanted to convey, it nevertheless does
seem an unavoidable consequence of these publishing decisions. As I read the stories in Flying to
America, some of them are indeed failed experiments, others simply not fully realized (always a
potential hazard with short fiction as inveterately risk-taking as Barthelme’s). But others are
Barthelme stories I would not want to be without—”Edward and Pia,” “The Big Broadcast of
1938″—and it seems to me a very unhappy fate for these stories that they in effect remain buried
in a volume that is likely to be regarded, should these omnibus collections become the only point
of access to his work, as containing Barthelme’s least substantial pieces.
Certainly not all of the stories to be found in either Sixty Stories or Forty Stories are gems
either, although this is more a function of Barthelme’s relentlessly experimental approach than it
is a judgment on his skills as a writer. Though there is something identifiably Barthelmean in all
of his stories—a voice, a familiarity with many different cultural domains, a comedian’s sense of
timing and effect—what characterizes his body of work as a whole is an always adventurous
determination to reconceive the form and the discursive assumptions of the short story as
inherited by mid 20th-century writers. Rarely does Barthelme stick to a previously employed
method or device (with the possible exception of the “dialogue” stories—stories written entirely
in dialogue—that Barthelme wrote throughout his career but especially in the mid-to-late ’70s).
One of the pleasures of reading Barthelme’s stories as they appeared, both in The New Yorker
and in the subsequent books, was anticipating what new challenge to our assumptions about the
nature of the short story Barthelme would offer. Many of these stories were indeed among the
most innovative works of fiction in a period marked by a renewal of innovation by American
fiction writers, but inevitably Barthelme’s insistent experimentalism would provide hits and
misses, failed experiments as well as transformative triumphs.
The opportunity to witness this process of experimentation with the conventions of
fiction, however, may be lost to future Barthelme readers (except for those intrepid few who
resolve to recreate the process as adequately as possible by tracing it through the collected
volumes, reading each story in order of publication). These readers will encounter stories from
every period in Barthelme’s writing career indiscriminately mixed together, many of them no
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