{"id":241817,"date":"2026-04-09T10:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T10:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/241817\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T10:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T10:37:07","slug":"donald-barthelmes-houston-the-city-behind-the-postmodern-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/241817\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Barthelme\u2019s Houston: The City Behind the Postmodern Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Barthelme was the image of a New York<\/a> writer. He published in The New Yorker, wrote about lofts, cocktails, and conceptual art<\/a>, and perfected a tone of urban irony that seemed inseparable from Manhattan itself. But that sensibility was born at about as much of a cultural distance from New York\u2019s most famous island as there was.<\/p>\n

Manhattan has long cultivated that illusion of centrality\u2014an illusion perhaps nowhere better encapsulated than in one of the great New Yorker covers of all time\u2014and indeed, one of the great magazine covers of all time. I\u2019m thinking of Saul Steinberg\u2019s \u201cView of the World from 9th Avenue,\u201d which adorned the March 29, 1976, issue of the magazine. From its satirical vantage, the vast expanse beyond the Hudson River is reduced to a barren lunar surface; the rest of the country appears roughly the size of four Manhattan blocks. The joke takes pleasure in a Manhattanite\u2019s tendency to confuse their parochial island and its teapot tempests for the world itself.<\/p>\n

Steinberg, an outsider who made Manhattan legible to itself, understood how provincial cosmopolitanism could be. Through\u00a0The New Yorker, he became emblematic of a national persona that often imagined itself universal. In this dynamic\u2014the outsider who becomes the face of the metropolis\u2014Steinberg found his closest literary analog in Barthelme himself, who would come to perform a similar trick in prose: making Manhattan feel both definitive and faintly absurd at once.<\/p>\n

Like Steinberg, Barthelme\u2014novelist, short story writer, and mentor to countless young writers\u2014came to epitomize the droll urbanity of Manhattan in the \u201970s and \u201980s, its aloof decadence and dry wit. As Scott Bradfield wrote for the same magazine in 1993, Barthelme \u201cfit into\u00a0The New Yorker\u2019s\u00a0fictional timeline quite neatly\u2026Manhattan was the perfect subject for Barthelme\u2019s comic method.\u201d Between 1963 and the late 1980s, he placed 129 stories in the magazine.<\/p>\n

Barthelme\u2019s Manhattan was not Uptown elegance but Downtown irony: editors nursing scotches, IBM Selectric typewriters clacking through the night in cramped bedsits, loft parties in SoHo before the neighborhood was merely south of Houston\u2014Houston Street, that is, pronounced \u201cHouse-ton,\u201d and a different place in more ways than one than Don\u2019s city on the bayou. New York\u2019s clutter\u2014overflowing ashtrays, cocktail napkins, half-ironic talk of \u201cmodernity\u201d\u2014fueled the fragments that became his stories.<\/p>\n

Consider his short story \u201cThe Balloon\u201d (1966), in which a massive balloon mysteriously expands over Manhattan, becoming a civic event and conceptual artwork at once. Or, City Life (1970), the novella whose vignettes render the normalized chaos of skyscraper offices into a distributed installation. No doubt, New York gave Barthelme material.<\/p>\n

But \u201cBeau\u201d\u2014as Barthelme\u2019s friends knew him\u2014was not, as the expression goes, to the manner born. As his friend, the author Thomas Pynchon memorably put it, behind Barthelme\u2019s \u201cslick city-sophisticate disguise\u201d there still lingered \u201cthis good old Dairy Queen regular\u2026harboring the mischievous daydreams of a Texas rounder.\u201d Houston, his hometown, remained a source of both attraction and discomfort\u2014\u201cin Texas-size quantities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth is that Barthelme\u2019s fictional impulses were polished\u2014and found their perfect setting\u2014in New York, but their \u201chighly seasoned\u201d DNA is all Houston.<\/p>\n

In 1975, Barthelme published his Freudian satirical novel\u00a0The Dead Father. He was well-suited to the topic, having lived a Freudian satire of his own. His father, Donald Sr., was a famous modernist architect<\/a> and professor at the University of Houston. The younger Don dropped out of that same university after a desultory try and went to work as a journalist for The\u00a0Houston Post. As he later told\u00a0The Paris Review, \u201cWe were enveloped in modernism.\u201d His father, who had designed their home, ensured that. \u201cThe house we lived in\u2026was modern and the furniture was modern and the pictures were modern and the books were modern,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n

After a stint in the army during the Korean War and several years working as a journalist at The\u00a0Houston Post, Barthelme began drifting toward the literary world that would eventually lead him to New York in the early 1960s. The move was not unusual\u2014midcentury Manhattan still functioned as the gravitational center of American letters\u2014but for Barthelme it meant translating a sensibility formed in Houston\u2019s uneasy modernity into a language legible to the East Coast establishment.<\/p>\n

Even as a young man, Barthelme was developing a creative consciousness in a strange place, one where high-concept modernism flourished within a city still powerfully, even confrontationally, regional. He learned early to value \u201cthe new\u201d above all else. That\u2019s a deceptively simple orientation. On the one hand, it is the credo of the modernist movement\u2014Ezra Pound\u2019s injunction to \u201cmake it new.\u201d On the other, an ethos of novelty \u00fcber alles opens itself to charges of indifference to tradition and history: the very kryptonite of highbrow sophistication.<\/p>\n

That paradox mirrors Houston in the postwar decades: a city so desperate to modernize, build, grow, and advance that it often obliterated its own past<\/a>. Whole blocks of early-twentieth-century bungalows were bulldozed for freeways. Concrete was poured faster than streets could be named. Modernist towers rose beside bayous still half-wild, while developers advertised \u201cTomorrow\u2019s Neighborhoods, Today.\u201d The result was a city that looked as though it had skipped a century of history\u2014an architectural collage as strange and restless as Barthelme\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

Both Houston and Barthelme\u2019s prose hummed with excitement about the future\u2014and a concomitant indifference to the past\u2014that achieved surreal and absurdist scope. Beau Barthelme never donned arch Henry Ford drag to pronounce history bunk. He didn\u2019t have to. What he liked were surfaces and things, especially the glossy ones. As Pynchon called it, \u201cBarthelismo.\u201d<\/p>\n

He liked things bright, shiny, moldable: the characteristics of plastic made with petrochemicals refined right there in Houston.<\/p>\n

If New York was the marketplace for his fiction, Houston was its refinery, and plastic was a perfect metaphor. It is an oil-born substance that can take any shape\u2014polished and disposable, brilliant and toxic. It is infinitely reproducible, molded under pressure, hardened into forms that look permanent but are anything but. Houston, capital of the American petrochemical industry, refines the very materials that made late-twentieth-century modernity feel synthetic. And Barthelme\u2019s sentences behave the same way\u2014synthetic, smooth, resistant to decay because they are not really made of organic material to begin with. They gleam. They flex. They resist sentimentality.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Balloon,\u201d for instance, the titular object itself resists symbolic depth, existing instead as a surface to be interpreted and reinterpreted at will. \u201cThere was no getting around the fact that the balloon was there,\u201d the narrator notes, flatly, as if describing a piece of infrastructure. Elsewhere, Barthelme\u2019s prose moves with the same manufactured smoothness: \u201cFragments are the only forms I trust,\u201d he writes in\u00a0City Life, a line that reads less like confession than like a Houstonian design principle.<\/p>\n

Houston became, in its own way, a node in the broader postmodern turn\u2014a place where fiction\u2019s emerging obsession with surfaces and plastic forms found a material analog. Andy Warhol, one of plastic\u2019s most famous admirers, once said he wanted to be plastic: a condition already well into beta testing in Houston. It was a place where the drive, as Ezra Pound said, to make it new met a willingness to tear down what came before, where surfaces\u2014glass towers, vinyl seats, neon signage\u2014were treated less as masks than as just-the-facts-ma\u2019am. Barthelme\u2019s fiction registers that same logic. His stories don\u2019t dig beneath appearances so much as rearrange them, treating the world as something already processed, already synthetic.<\/p>\n

Barthelme\u2019s unique contribution to the national zeitgeist was rooted in that contradictory city: modernist yet regional; synthetic yet still, somehow, humid; ambitious yet unserious. His fiction did not merely reflect Manhattan\u2019s self-awareness. It carried within it the petrochemical energy of a city forever under construction.<\/p>\n

Barthelme\u2019s relationship to Houston was not merely formative; it was ongoing. Beginning in the 1970s, he returned regularly to teach creative writing at the University of Houston, eventually moving back full-time in 1983 to direct its now-prestigious Creative Writing Program. The city he had once left became, again, a site of literary production and influence<\/a>. He died here in 1989, closing a career that had always, in some sense, been bookended by Houston.<\/p>\n

When Steinberg drew his map of Manhattan looking west, he meant it as a joke about parochial vision. Barthelme, in his way, redrew that map from the opposite direction\u2014from the swampy flatlands of a city that few New Yorkers could find in their own atlas. He showed that just like architecture, satire needs foundations somewhere real. From that vantage, the little balloon over Manhattan becomes only one bright piece of a larger sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Barthelme was the image of a New York writer. He published in The New Yorker, wrote about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":{"0":"post-241817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-houston","9":"tag-houston-headlines","10":"tag-houston-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}