There Must Be Some Mistake

August 4, 2014
Barthelme, a master of minimalist suburbia-set fiction (Waveland), returns with a buoyantly offbeat murder tale that doubles as a meditation on everything from contemporary art to Google to mortality. The setting is Forgetful Bay, a condo development in Kemah, Tex., where 50-something Wallace Webster lives alone. His solitary existence is interrupted mainly by visits from Jilly, a younger former coworker of his, and Morgan, his college-age daughter from a failed marriage. Then, a slew of apparently accidental deaths strikes the neighborhood, along with a few other strange incidents—notably, a woman, Chantal White, being doused with Yves Klein blue paint in a guerilla-like attack. After Wallace begins an affair with Chantal, police investigators come to see him, but rather than feeling frightened, he finds their questions “oddly reassuring.... Like your life imitating television.” Throughout the novel, his narration provides punchy, wry commentary on the banality of pop culture, but the tone is, ultimately, infectiously optimistic. Taking inventory of his neighbors’ kitschy lawn statuary, Wallace considers getting a few gnomes or a Virgin Mary of his own. “I mean, why not? Where’s the harm in a little blind faith, a little hope in the face of the grotesque spectacle of ordinary life in this century?” Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

August 15, 2014
With a divorced male in his 50s living on the Gulf Coast and sorting out various female attachments, this 15th book of fiction from Barthelme (Waveland, 2009, etc.) covers turf similar to that of his last two novels. Wallace Webster occupies a condo in a development called Forgetful Bay in a town halfway between Galveston and Houston in the century's second decade. He's on affectionate terms with four women: his dead first wife's daughter, his living ex-wife, a younger ex-colleague and an age-appropriate casual lover from a neighboring condo named Chantal White. Her rich history will punctuate the book with moments of violence after she's introduced in her kitchen bound by an intruder with picture-hanging wire and smeared with Yves Klein blue paint (Wallace, like the author, was once an artist and knows color). Another neighbor will get a bullet in the head that may be self-inflicted or a parting shot from his wife, miffed perhaps because a woman in a black slip and heels was dancing early one morning in their driveway. Such incidents provide the only significant action and a little mystery in Wallace's otherwise quiet life of navigating among his women and memories, dabbling in questions of faith, love and death. He's "interested in the surfaces" and makes "small pictures, collages, postcards, other almost miniature objects"-which is a fair description of Barthelme's craft. The dialogue, while entertainingly clever, presents almost every speaker as tersely ironic and in danger of sounding like Seinfeld via Elmore Leonard. His prose sometimes blossoms, though, as in a description of grade-school nuns "who streamed out of the convent like so many ants the better to look me over and tsk and tsk and click their little black beads." Barthelme doesn't resolve everything for Wallace, and the ending will have book clubs arguing for hours. Understated, seemingly offhanded, Barthelme's writing conveys much about the oddities of contemporary life with warmth and welcome humor.

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September 1, 2014
Barthelme (Waveland, 2009), the wily bard of the Gulf Coast, invites us to see life through artist Wallace Webster's acutely receptive eyes. Shocked to be pushed out of the design firm he helped create, Wallace finds himself reveling in the views from his Forgetful Bay condo and enjoying serendipitous visits with his sharp-witted, college student daughter, Morgan, and, Jilly, a considerably younger former coworker. But Forgetful Bay is under siege. Sexy and darkly enigmatic Chantal is tied up and painted blue. Someone is shot. Someone else shoots himself. Detective Jean Darling questions Wallace repeatedly, Jilly's abusive ex seduces every other woman in Wallace's life, and Chantal's tattooed performance artist daughter, Tinker, appears in a nimbus of menace. Yet Wallace, a boardwalk Buddha spellbound by the seedy beauty and high-caloric cuisine of the Texas coast, remains content to let things take their course, however dire. Propelled by staccato dialogue and a soundtrack of trashy television shows, Barthelme's devilishly funny, gorgeously atmospheric, and wryly noirish farce brilliantly poses provocative questions about artifice and reality, loyalty and love, cowardice and valor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2014

Wallace Webster, a fiftysomething commercial artist laid off from his firm, aimlessly spends his time in his Texas condo development surfing the Internet, watching Scandinavian crime dramas, and hanging around with a bevy of women, including Chantal, a woman with a history; his college-age daughter, Morgan; and his thirtysomething former coworker Jilly. Wallace's relationship with Jilly is nonsexual and undefined, though there seems to be a potential that Wallace is unwilling or unable to pursue. A series of seemingly unconnected deaths and other bizarre events begin to rock the development as Wallace finds it increasingly difficult to juggle his relationships, especially when his ex-wife, Diane, and Jilly's ex-husband, Cal, become involved. VERDICT Barthelme is keenly attuned to the zeitgeist in a way that recalls John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich. Much of the novel consists of the characters having conversations about their backstories, and despite the string of strange events in the neighborhood, one wonders when or if the threads will coalesce into a plot. They do, however, in a way that will move readers to want to reread to pick up the clues missed the first time. The ambiguous ending adds to the fun or frustration, depending on your taste. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/14.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2014

Divorced, fiftyish, and already forced to retire, Wallace Webster lives in a Texas condo development whose residents are dying at a surprising clip. As he ponders his neighbors' fate, Wallace considers whether settling for less means giving in or wisely adjusting. A New York Times Notable Book author.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.