September 30th, 2019 - The Fellow
Dear TNY,
Oh man. What a week. And now I’m done reading “The Fellow”.
I want to preface all this by saying that I have read a good bit of Barthelme and I get some of it. Definitely not all. I’m way more attuned to Barry Hannah or Coover. What should be said about these abstract pieces, whomever created them, is that the writing must do something. I was talking with Padgett Powell once about Barthelme and he said that Barthelme famously said that the wacky must break their hearts. So as an arch, that’s what the wacky must do. But as a substructure to the arch, the nuts and bolts and bracing and girders, these wacky pieces must be a delight to read. Fresh. Edgy. Etc. Coover does that well. So does Barthelme. Wait, didn’t you pub a Coover story recently (in the last year) that was legit? I believe you did. Anywhoozle, this story doesn’t do that. It’s not a joy to read. It’s short, so that is good. But it’s not crisp enough. Tight enough. Clever enough. Crackly enough. It’s just plain old writing with an absurd storyline. That’s not good enough. I would be curious to hear how you feel after reading the Coover piece you published and then this piece. If your response was anything other than, “Well shit; I see where we fucked that up,” I would be fucking astonished.
Enough of that.
I wanted to let you know that I wrote another letter on Thursday. See, TNY, I’m going through some shit right now. Internal shit. Emotional shit. It’s actually breaking me down physically. You ever get so fucking broken down as a human that you might be making yourself sick but you don’t care enough about continuing on (and by that I mean living) that you neglect to care for said sick? Word. Me too. So I wrote you this letter that was about a story that was printed in Esquire in ’84. I needed to write that letter to talk about what I needed to talk about. Oooooh, obscure Carver reference there? Totes. What I’m trying to say is that, maybe we can talk about other stuff? I’ll still review the stories. But, and I mean this in the most facetious way, you are the best listener because you don’t cut me off. You don’t judge me. You don’t tell me what I’m doing is wrong or right. You don’t, actually, say anything.
So maybe every once in a while I’ll just tell you what’s going on it my life. Who cares, amiright? You don’t.
Anyway, I appreciate that you tried abstract but I feel like I could have predicted that it wouldn’t work.
Nick
