Issyvoo

Books The Dead Father

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.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Thomas R. Edwards New York Review of Books
He is a Post-Modernist in a very literal sense, treating the Modernist inheritance in much the same way as [T. S. Eliot] bagged decorative fragments from earlier cultures. The Dead Father […] is a Pop Art resumé of a central theme from Finnegans Wake.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books Patrick Parrinder London Review of Books
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.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review Donald Barthelme The Paris Review 1981

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.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker New Yorker
I am not sure that my progress through all these dull little sentences has been entirely justified […] but there is no doubt that beneath the mannerisms, the infantile chic, the ill-digested culture of an alien world, Barthelme does have a talent for, of all things in this era, writing. Shall I quote an example? I think not. Meanwhile, Barthelme himself says, “I have trouble reading, in these days. I would rather drink, talk or listen to music…. I now listen to rock constantly.” Yes.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Gore Vidal New York Review of Books 1976

This is almost certainly not a good novel. But, whatever it is, it’s a very good one. It brims with wit and inventive postmodernist self-indulgence.

— Brian Flanagan