Messages by Mirror

CITY LIFE by Donald Barthelme. 168 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

The dust jacket provides the perfect image for the contents. An older man and a girl, dressed in what appears to be nightshirts, are dancing a sort of ring-around-a-rosy. Despite clasped hands, the two are curiously abstracted. Their eyes do not meet. Their smiles do not match. A vaguely Marat/ Sade promise of violence seems to be in the air. The manic energy of the dance generates no gaiety, no warmth. This is a social act in a vacuum--dance seen as antic pathological spin.

Welcome to Donald Barthelme's world.

Barthelme is a quiet, scholarly young Texan--former philosophy student, former art-museum director--who writes the most disturbing and inventive short stories around. Taken together with his earlier books, Come Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, the 14 stories of City Life establish him as the master experimentalist of his genre. He is a writer who may well be changing the definition of a short story the way Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter have changed the definition of a play.

Scaling the Glass Mountain. What goes on in Barthelme's surrealistic, mad-dance little world? In the first place, it is peopled with the oddest, the most chillingly funny characters: Horace, a gourmet-policeman, whose piece de resistance is Rock Cornish hen; Lars Bang, a coachman out of a period print who hits and runs like a Mafia mobster; and there is even the Phantom of the Opera's Friend.

Barthelme's settings are even odder than the characters who inhabit them. Barthelme writes about a country named Paraguay. It is not in South America; it is a neverland where everybody has the same fingerprints and sexual intercourse occurs only when the temperature is between 66DEG and 69DEG Fahrenheit.

In another story, Barthelme summons up a glass mountain at the corner of 13th Street and Eighth Avenue. With the help of climbing irons and a plumber's friend, one of his fixated antiheroes tries to climb it.

Then there is Barthelme's Tolstoy Museum, including 30,000 giant pictures of the great Russian master as well as a 640,086-page Jubilee Edition of Tol-stov's published works.

But Barthelme characters and Barthelme settings pale beside Barthelme plots--or what passes as plots. One story consists of 100 sentences, neatly numbered. Another story, Sentence, is just that: 7 1/2 pages of breathless, free-form monologue dotted by commas, colons, even exclamation points, but nary a period--not even at the end. The Explanation is formed as a series of questions and answers. But the answers start turning into questions themselves, and of course nothing is ever explained.

Pinning down a Barthelme story is obviously a surrealistic experience --rather like trying to explain a Groucho Marx joke to someone who has never heard of Groucho Marx. In desperation Barthelme critics sometimes resort to the comparison gambit, frantically coupling their man with a host of others in the course of one review. The catalogue ranges from Dickens, Swift and Joyce to Kafka, Nabokov and Henry Miller.

Shrinking Supertown. Yet Barthelme remains himself, with a clear, private antilogic running through almost all his stories. As a Texan transplanted to New York, his working premise seems to be that everything in the world of supertown is so oversize and so shrill that no one notices any of it. Mass anesthesia is the result. His remedy: to shrink life to the miniature so that the reader is obliged to bend and squint to see the madness, perfectly proportioned to a bizarre cameo.

In Views of My Father Weeping, Barthelme even trivializes death. And by making it so casual, so dull, so buried in petty, everyday detail, he also makes the reader feel the horror of death as no apocalyptic heaping up of corpses could.

Barthelme is a genius at self-consciousness. He uses cliches to make the reader think; he uses parodies to stir emotion. Like a billiard shark trying carom shots, he plays worn emotional impacts and responses against one another. The meaning behind the meaning in his stories is that the old main lines of communication are down. The simple, the forthright, the straightforward can no longer be confidently said. For the time being at least, messages must be sent by mirrors. And at that game, Donald Barthelme knows no peer.

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