Steve Barthelme

Like his brothers, Steve is a Texan by birth. He was born in Houston on July 7, 1947, the son of an architect (his father) and a school teacher (his mother). He attended Boston College in 1965-66, then the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a B.A. in 1972. After graduating, he worked as a Review Editor for The Texas Observer in Austin and then as a copywriter for various advertising agencies in Austin and Houston.

In 1984, he earned an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, the same school his brother Frederick was graduated from seven years before. He used this graduate degree to get a job as an instructor at Northeast Louisiana University, Monroe, and then in 1986, to become an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where his brother Frederick also teaches.

Tom LeClair describes Steve Barthelme’s work as largely minimalist, in the tradition of Carver and inspired by Chekhov, yet as another reviewer notes, unique enough that it does not seem reminiscent of either of his brothers’ works.

His collection of stories, And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, recounts a string of adulteries from differing points of view. It is largely pessimistic and darkly humorous but with an absurdity that reduces the collection’s gloom. LeClair says that the stories are “about what we don’t, won’t, and can’t say.” The characters are speakers and listeners who almost never change roles. Most of them are middle-class whites in theit thirties, drifting in and out of love. Half of the stories occur inside automobiles.

As for Barthelme’s style, it is made up of short, choppy sentences with few metaphors. The stories in the first collection are very short. None are over fourteen pages. They are closer to vignettes, notes Jim Spencer in his review, than to stories with long rambling plots.

The title of the collection derives from a Chekhov story entitled “Lament” or “Grief,” depending on the translation. In the story, a poor cabdriver, whose son has died and who lacks an audience to speak to, tells his story to his horse. The title’s origin suggests something about the voices in the Barthelme’s collection. Two of the stories, in fact, are outright laments themselves: “Stoner’s Lament” and “Black Jack.”

Barthelme has won several awards for his fiction, including several PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards and a Pushcart Prize in 1993. He publishes widely in literary magazines, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere.

—Jon M. Davies

Mississippi
Review
Web Edition