In these odd and elegant, often heartbreaking new stories, wives give away husbands, lovers dispatch each other, and grown men steal tiny stray dogs from parking lots of dawn. It's nothing unusual. Frederick Barthelme's characters continue to circle the self-serve gas stations and drive-in groceries of our culture, looking for each other and finding the quiet, stinging moments in which the mundane gives way suddenly miraculously to the profound. Like the rest of us, these people are dodging Pop Secret microwave popcorn, rented videotapes of maximum-blood death rituals, and three-ply, steel-laminate, chrome-yellow garbage brags, and while they're ducking they manage to think and feel like ordinary human beings, rescuing a little bit of love and tenderness from the whirling trash heap of our throwaway world.
Chroma is Barthelme's second collection of stories about people who are sometimes a little loud, or too quiet, or foolishly, expansive, but who are always trying to get on key, to get in line. No one writing now has a cleaner understanding of what men and women give to, and learn from, each other, or of what draws them together with such power. So, through the magical spew of artifacts and winged detritus pouring from our shopping malls, car lots and televisions. Barthelme's people tackle the tough work of knowing each other, and they succeed=the message is that intimacy is primary and transcendent, it saves us.
With his previous collection, Moon Deluxe, and two novels, Second Marriage and Tracer: Barthelme has made his spare and laconic prose, his impeccable cutting dialogue, the charming and slightly threatening world his characters inhabit, touchstones of the new fiction. Chroma is a stunning elaboration-the lens is still focused at distortion level, but the characters are willing to stand still, to show themselves. What emerges is a brilliantly lighted world in which ordinary feeling, far from being lost to the glitz, plays David to its Goliath. This is a smart book. These stores are ours.