The Teachings of Don B.

Barthelme . . . happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight 'reality.' Thomas Pynchon, from the Introduction A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem Big Bull de Kooning. A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your daughter's wedding. An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God. These astonishing tropes of the imagination could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, whountil his death in 1989seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is a literary testament cum time bomb, with the...