Issyvoo

The writing is Mr. Barthelme at his most facile—flicking scenes onto the page with scarcely a breath. (“The road. The caravan. People taking pictures of the caravan with little pronghorn cameras. Flashes of light.”) The work can be grasped by any reader—even the least suspecting—as an appropriately slapstick homage to the spirit of anarchy.

I don’t think I’ve ever had much to say about God except as a locus of complaint, a convention, someone to rail against. The Dead Father suggests that the process of becoming has bound up in it the experience of many other consciousnesses, the most important of which are in a law-giving relation to the self. The characters complain about this in what I hope is an interesting fashion.

The Dead Father is described by its publishers as “a novel,” and although that’s not quite right, still it is a more connected work of fiction than anything Barthelme has yet written. The connections are admittedly rudimentary: a recurring set of characters with ordinary names like Thomas, Julie, and Emma, who embark on a quest, broad comedy alternating with pathos, intimations of “larger” significances that are decently obscured by some attention to what’s human and social.