Sadness

First Edition.
In reviewing City Life, Donald Barthelme’s previous collection of stories, Morris Dickstein said in a front-page New York Times Book Review article that “it goes beyond experimental ingenuity to confirm the maturity of a major talent.” Now, in Sadness, that judgment is upheld and extended.
Barthelme deals with world-pictures, some old, some new. Some have grown shabby, have been devalued; some have increased in importance, have accrued value. He points to shifts, changes.
Thus, in the story “The Sandman” a lover attempts to correct the view of his beloved held by the latter’s psychiatrist, not neglecting in the process to suggest that the psychiatrist is a priest of a failed religion. Thus, in “The Temptation of St. Anthony” the saint is shown as struggling with the greatest of temptations, ordinary life. In “Daumier” the narrator invents ways of escaping the tyranny of the self through the medium of a remarkable construct, a surrogate self usefully employed “on the plains and pampas of consciousness” in such pursuits as rescuing the Queen’s necklace and protecting a restless herd of au pair girls. The heroine of “Perpetua” has thrown her husband away and, suddenly free, enters a rich and strange new life “spread out before her like a red velvet map.” Sadness is a marvelous book-Barthelme’s talent at the height of its powers.
Donald Barthelme’s most recent work, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, was the winner of the 1972 National Book Award for children’s books. His other books are Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Snow White; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; and City Life.