"Chablis" by Donald Barthelme & the risks of style-forward reading material

More like poetry than almost any prose we have

My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.

My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma momma momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.

~ “Chablis,” by Donald Barthelme

David Foster Wallace said he decided to write fiction after reading a short story called “The Balloon,” by Donald Barthelme. Back when DFW was my principal literary inspiration, before I found out that he was an abuser who pushed Mary Karr out of a moving car, this connection was what got me reading Barthelme.

Dave Eggers, in a very Dave Eggersian introduction to the collection Forty Stories, described Barthelme as follows:

The fact is that work like Don B’s—which is playful, subtle, beautiful, and more like poetry (in its perfect ambivalence toward narrative) than almost any prose we have—would be seen today as frivolous, as unserious.

Barthelme was a very skilled stylist who was more or less uninterested in “plot.” His work, which I like very much, makes a dangerous suggestion to the aspiring author: if your writing is of sufficiently high quality, it doesn’t matter if the things that happen in your stuff are connected, or even if things happen at all.

The excerpt at the top of this post is from “Chablis,” which is the very first story in Forty Stories. They did a New Yorker fiction podcast on it: Listen Here. I haven’t listened to this myself. Can’t vouch for the quality of podcast guest Etgar Keret’s reading voice or his post-reading analysis though I can say that he looks pretty scary in his headshot:

“sylar from heroes” energy

I could analyze the story or w/e but I don’t have anything especially smart to say about it. It’s a good story. I like it. What I actually want to talk about is how reading Barthelme & Wallace & all the other postmodern (or post-postmodern) literary stylists of the late 20th century may have poisoned my brain.

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warning: the following bit is about my stuff

A while back I showed my #1 fiction-writing friend Roy Graham a story I’d written. I thought it was one of my better attempts. Here’s what Roy said:

you’re right that the writing is really sharp
as a larger piece I don’t know what it’s doing
I feel like it needs to be more than a funny well-written anecdote
someone needs to change, something needs to surprise me
this has to end up mattering in some way
does that make sense?

It did make sense. It occurred to me when he sent those messages that I’ve never gotten past “funny well-written anecdote” when it comes to short fiction. Maybe it goes without saying but an anecdote is not a story.

Reflecting on that, I started to feel like maybe I’d been investing all my Writing Stat Points in categories like “Jokes” and “Style” but nowhere near enough in “Storytelling.”

justin’s Stat Point allocations, 2010-2021

In obsessive pursuit of becoming a “good writer,” I have invested much time into building better sentences, constructing whizzbang dialogue, describing things in intense sensory terms, etc. I wrote some pretty decent freelance journalism this way. At work I’m writing some pretty decent videogame dialogue this way. But when I direct this skillset toward short stories, I fail, over and over again.

I can write an opening paragraph that will hook your attention. But I can’t follow through. My stories are like storefronts on the set of a 1950s Western… behind each carefully crafted façade, there’s nothing but desert.

Part of the issue may be that I read a lot of flashy, style-forward postmodern fiction in my formative years, and learned the wrong lessons from that material.¹ I wanted to write something with bold and distinctive style. But even in Barthelme’s supposedly plotless stories, meaningful action occurs. Things change. Things happen, and the things that happen matter. In “Chablis,” the narrator starts out opposed to the idea of a dog. A few pages later, he has changed his mind.

If you, like me, read forty Donald Barthelme stories and attempt to write something in a similar vein, you will certainly succeed at writing something “weird” and “random” and “surreal”—but it won’t be any good. It won’t be any good because you, like me, aren’t Donald Barthelme—but also because the things that stand out about his writing aren’t the full picture of what makes his writing good.

So. Time to learn structure, I guess :)

1. Maybe it would be more correct to say that I only learned some of the lessons I was supposed to. Style is still cool lol