Donald Barthelme’s Slick City-Sophisticate Disguise

Trying to describe Donald Barthelme’s politics is as dodgy as trying to label his work, but Watergate sure did get him revved up. Nixon by then had already mutated into a desperate and impersonal force, no longer your traditionally human-type president but now some faceless subgod of folly. Barthelme, perhaps as a species of anarchist curse, just calls him “the President.” The rage behind it, provoked by the ongoing spectacle of national politics in the U.S. as presided over by anybody, is natural enough if you look at the regimes Barthelme happened to be working under. Among many sad consequences of his passing is that we won’t know what he might have done with Bush as a subject, although “Kissing the President,”  in its consideration of Reagan, may give off premonitory hints.

One out of several humiliating features about writing fiction for a living is that here after all is just about everybody else, all along the capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems analysts, cheerfully selling their bodies or body parts according to time-honored custom and usage, while it’s only writers, out at the fringes of the entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are obliged, more intimately and painfully, actually to sell their dreams, yes, dreams these days you’ll find are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it, though, in most cases it doesn’t present much moral problem, since dreams seldom make it through into print with anything like theof the primary experience. So it’s a safe bet that most writers’ dreams, maybe even including the best ones, manage to stay untranslated and private after all.