Painted Desert.

Davis, Robert Murray

The subtitle "A Novel" is perhaps an overstatement, for while it suggests the possibility of a very interesting novel about the relationship of two middle-aged men who want each other's lives, Frederick Barthelme has instead produced a sort of minimalist version of On the Road which is part very perfunctory and cliched travelogue, part novel of ideas, and part inventory of topics being covered by the media in 1994.

The story begins with O.J. Simpson's flight in the white Bronco, which prompts narrator Del's girlfriend Jen, twenty years younger than he, to decide to go to California to exact revenge on one of the Rodney King rioters and perhaps, as Jen's e-mail correspondence urges, on all the violent and stupid and thoughtless. (Del and Jen were major characters in Barthelme's 1993 novel The Brothers.) They pick up Mike, her father, only six years older than Del, and later her contemporary Penny.

The four travel to the site of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, then, more aimlessly, to tourist attractions and UFO centers in New Mexico and Arizona. There they abandon the California trip because Mike and Penny want to get on with a life together and Jen and Del discover that the natural sights of the Southwest "lift you up and make you feel like everything's possible, everything's worthwhile" and that "We've got to find some new things to love" before deciding to get married and settle down.

While the Wordsworthian resolution seems imposed, it is less problematic than the female characters. Penny has no voice of her own. Her poststructuralist analysis of genital painting is unlike anything else she says, which is not much, and not interesting. But Jen, absorbed in a self that has little capacity, deserves far less attention and admiration than the first-person narrator gives her, which makes the reader wonder why he is worth listening to or caring about. As even Penny knows about Jen's attraction to media reports of various disasters, "You don't have to go that far to get a real feeling."

The novel does come to life in the conversations between Del and Mike, who sees from the beginning that the California quest is futile, and in Del's monologues about the failure of his marriage and his memories of a home movie featuring his mother. At the end, Mike gets a girlfriend his daughter's age, while Del is belatedly emulating Mike's square, stable life.

But too much else gets in the way. Perhaps Barthelme's method and speed of composition are to blame. In the summer of 1994 Barthelme traveled through New Mexico and Arizona, composing on a tape recorder and editing from transcriptions. This accounts for the distortion of New Mexico's Elephant Butte into Elephant View and for undigested travel-guide material and tossed-off opinions like the one about Salman Rushdie being "a self-absorbed nit milking his dinky assassination threat."

These are remarks, and as Gertrude Stein said to Ernest Hemingway, "Remarks are not literature." To put it another way, Barthelme has not taken enough care to absorb discursive material into a fictional pattern, so that his usual deceptively casual method seems in this novel merely careless.

Barthelme has written better books, notably the marvelous Two Against One (1988), and when he gets rid of Jen, her computer, and his tape recorder, he will do so again.

Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma