Tracer Book

Barthelme is an interesting writer--much more plainspoken than his older, dead, famous brother Donald. Frederick (Rick to those who know him) usually writes slim novels and stories without any flowery writing and major personal epiphanies. Don't get me wrong--he can write--but his characters do not spend paragraphs and pages ruminating on their own feelings and the conflicts they experience. Instead, they do things more than they think about things, and we, the readers, watch and learn, trying to figure out what is making them tick.

Tracer is no different. It is a terrific little story, interesting from the opening paragraph, with characters whose lives are given to us only in the present. We see them on their own terms in the scenes we are getting, with almost no flashbacks to help add another piece to the puzzle of who they are. At times, the narrative may appear shallow, but this comes from Barthelme's entrenchment in a minimalist style. And there are beautiful descriptions of the commercialized gulf coast, via mid-eighties, that sets a complext tonality to the whole novel.