Frederick Barthelme's stories portray with humor, detachment, precision, and deep affection that everyday world of contemporary America. Rarely has a writer, so caught the mood and tempo of our daily lives, with their shopping malls, small businesses, suburban neighbors, and busy quotidian affairs. Now Moon Deluxe brings together seventeen of these wonderful pieces, ranging in subject from the jockeying between the sexes to small town life to the vagaries of the individual-all bathed in a dry lyricism that captures the humor and dignity of our ordinary lives.
Barthelme's characters inhabit a world of Subarus and suburban swimming pools, of polo shirts and quick good stands and neighborhood traffic jams. From these townscapes. Barthelme has distilled with splendid economy of means and trenchant will something of the strangeness of life, its surprising encounters and bizarre juxtapositions. While depicting the commonplace, his stories take on the atmosphere of quiet meditations, now amusing, now troubling, now unexpected, but invariably suffused with a quality of reticent but deep-felt affection.
"There are things that cannot be understood-things said at school; at the supermarket; or in this case by the pool of Santa Rosa Apartments on a lazy afternoon in midsummer." So begins "Pool Lights." Barthelme is a master at suggesting the unusual that lies just below the surface of the familiar. One of his stories opens with a woman, fully clad, throwing herself into a swimming pool. "The Browns" describes with marvelous humor the falling out between two families whose dog begin to fight. "Moon Deluxe," the title story, recounts the events of a casual suburban dinner gathering that gradually assumes something of the sheen of a mysterious rite. Throughout Barthelme's sensitivity to nuance, to atmosphere and surrounding detail, reminds one, in its subtlety and psychological effect, of the Japanese masters.