The World Is Too Much With Us: Ann Beattie Close-Reads Frederick Barthelme’s “Box Step”

As Johnny Carson used to say (this, or some variation, often enough that he was made fun of for doing it), “That was weird wild stuff.” Adding: “I did not know that.” (It’s a four second clip on YouTube now.) This reaction offers a way into Frederick Barthelme’s story, “Box Step,” though when it was written in the early 80s, it would not have been particularly weird. It’s the author’s handling of the somewhat weird that’s interesting, his writing a story that undermines the status quo of literary weird. A quick and inadequate summary of the story: It’s about Henry (he is probably the boss), who works in an office fitted out in shades of gray, who has a crush on another worker named Ann, and who spends his non-working time playing with games or toys. The dialogue is good, and you get the sense that when they speak, the characters are aware of that. But there isn’t a lot of talk. The story is more rooted in motion—an acceptance, at least on Henry’s part, that, as in Wordsworth’s famous line, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” People speak briefly, including Henry, whose first helpful utterance is rather startling: He tells a young girl whom her parents think is about to make a big mistake, to “Do what you want and have an O.K. time. You can change it all later if you want to.” Not a great time, but an O.K. time, immersing herself in the gray, quotidian world of O.K., which everyone seems to occupy. Time does not pass quickly, though Barthelme’s story isn’t long. In the author’s delivery, it poses as occasionally wry reportage. Henry observes; Barthelme observes Henry observing. Until the end, the story has a staccato effect: written in present tense, this happens and that happens, then something else happens. Raymond Carver, who blurbed Moon Deluxe , Barthelme’s collection in which this story appeared after its publication in the New Yorker , would naturally have been very attuned to what was really going on. The initially gray, everyday world morphs into something […]

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