Barthelme, the Houstonian by Susan Choi

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By Susan Choi<br>May 22, 2026<br>On Books

The art and life of Mark di Suvero<br>-->

Donald Barthelme, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Public domain.

Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself.

Barthelme did not write numerous stories, and the occasional longer work, so much as he expressed his genius through the medium of language. A major aspect of his genius was concision. His exemplary works are all short and as sui generis as the fables of Aesop. Their publication, in his time, in such mainstream literary venues as The New Yorker attests to an age of American publishing that is long past. In contrast to Barthelme’s emblematic short form, Hiding Man, the biography of Barthelme by his former student and fellow writer Tracy Daugherty, is a Tolstoyesque tome at 592 pages, but this is exactly appropriate, because it is necessary to illustrate that Barthelme’s genius for concision or compression was also demonstrated by his life, into which he fit a wild variety of living while still managing to die far too young.

Donald Barthelme Jr. was born in 1931 into a family of exceptional brilliance and creativity. His father, Don Sr., was an architect of renown who concerned himself with what constituted the modern, building a house for his family of which Barthelme later said, “On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare.” Barthelme’s mother, Helen, was the sort of woman who could make a house full of Aalto and Saarinen furniture feel warm. She loved the theater, music, and literature, and her five children were such creative overachievers as to prompt comparisons to the James family, if the Jameses had lived in a stark modern box with a spiral staircase like half a DNA helix punching from one floor to the next. Barthelme enjoyed the sort of youth in which he and his friends—“poor little pale little white boys,” as he put it in his interview for The Paris Review—were tolerated by the regulars to bring their dorky enthusiasm to jazz clubs that were otherwise, audience and musicians, all Black. When Barthelme ran away from home to Mexico by hitchhiking with truckers and musicians, he was rescued by his father and grandfather, who seemed to enjoy the excursion. While still a teen, he wrote about jazz for the Houston Post. In college, he was the youngest-ever editor in chief of the college paper. A combat-free tour of duty in Korea delivered him back to Houston in time to find the August 1956 issue of Theatre Arts at Guy’s Newsstand, within which was the entire text of Waiting for Godot, as well as production photos. Standing at the newsstand, Barthelme read the whole play, then took it home to his then wife, Helen. “I found it exciting but did not foresee the implications for Don,” she recalls in her biography of Barthelme, published in 2001. “It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.”

Sixty Stories was first published in 1981 and comprises selections from Barthelme’s first eight books, which cover his output from 1961 to 1979, plus another book’s worth of previously uncollected stories. Of the selections from the eight books, sometimes we get a third or so of the original contents,...