Dawn Major Interview Frederick Barthelme Author of “Sun Deluxe: New and Collected Stories”

Sun Deluxe by Frederick Barthelme is an absolute smorgasbord; it’s your favorite characters in your favorite settings doing your favorite things. If your love language is awkward professors, annoying neighbors, recent divorcees, bad-boy boyfriends, throw-caution-to-the-wind teenagers, grossly neglectful parents, and the unfailing drunk at the New Year’s Eve Party, this collection is for you. Set in casinos, 24-hour diners, dive bars, rundown motels, college parties, shopping malls, and on a Greyhound bus, it’s Americana at its best. Barthelme’s characters could be anyone and are everyone. They do ordinary things in ordinary places but somewhere between the mundane something extraordinary occurs.

Dawn Major: Your opening story, “The Browns,” really sets the tone for the entire collection. Great satire. I kept asking myself, “Is this story really about a neighborhood dog fight or the pure absurdity of human interactions?” I thought your stories had this Cheever-esque quality if you were to replace Cheever’s upper middle class characters and settings with gritty Southerners…maybe Cheever meets George Singleton with a note of Suzanne Hudson, but obviously you have your own very distinct style. What do you think about the future of satirical writing? I worry that society has lost a sense of humor. How does the absurd or the mundane affect your characters? I am not suggesting this collection is nihilistic.

FB: Alas, I don’t think a thing about satirical writing. Most often it just appears in the text, developed by and out of the characters on the page. Everyone is a little bit wry these days. Hard to get along otherwise.

DM: In “Parents” there is a battle of wills over an electric mixer and the dispute over an appliance somehow leads to the decision to have a baby. “Parents” had a “Hills Like White Elephants” vibe. But you have a thing for writing about relationships to the extent that your titles— “Ray and Renee,” “Cecil and Agnes,” and” Margaret and Bud”— are named after two characters. What is the fascination? What draws you to write about relationships and tensions arising between males and females specifically? And by the way, I really related to the stepfather/stepdaughter relationship in “From Mars.” I’ve been there. You nailed it. But again, the push and pull.

Frederick Barthelme

FB: I’m comfortable with pairs of characters so I use them a fair amount. And relationships, as depicted by interaction between characters, seems a rich vein to operate in. What happens between characters is often the heart of what the work is about.

DM: The way you described the Chinese restaurant, Sun Deluxe, in the title story was music to my ears, pure poetry…I mean I read that description multiple times and was absolutely transported.

One night he (Vaughn) and Greta had dinner at Sun Deluxe, a tiny Chinese place run by two Vietnamese women, a typical coastal place—whitewashed re-purposed Exxon station with mismatched booths and flat silver ashtrays, the tables covered in strangely textured red plastic, sticky paper napkins, cheap chopsticks, jars of orange sauce on the table, an all-you-can-eat buffet every night no customers.

Here’s the thing, you can’t fake these settings without having had actual first-hand experience. Maybe I am wrong here, but as someone who has had the pleasure of travelling for days on a Greyhound bus, I thought surely you were inspired by a similar road trip of your own. So, how much of your personal life experiences inspired these stories?

FB: A good deal of personal experience goes into the work, though it’s always revised and extended, elaborated, massaged, messed with in various degrees. Re-imagined, turned upside down, tortured, screwed up, made silly or touching or some other thing that is wanted on the page. Play, there’s lots of play in the work and in the making of the work.

DM: And to continue on that same thread, your settings are hyperbolic or uber realistic. I personally believe that Southern writers are masters of hyperbole. I think its origins is derived from the grotesque and the landscapes that are decaying around the characters. I’m throwing a lot at you here, but what do you think about all this?

FB: The grotesque in a contained and otherwise comfortable narrative is often a lovely seasoning. I use it a fair amount in that way—in fiction it’s often charming, more so than in life.

Dawn Major

DM: Your settings have an interesting symbiotic relationship with your characters. Masterfully done. They, themselves, are characters and don’t simple provide a backdrop but are intricately woven into your characters’ lives and the plots. A quick and easy example is in “Cecil and Agnes” where you compare the resident kids living in a rundown condo in the Gulf with the short-term vacation renters:

In my view they were far preferable to the usual vacation renters who, it was my thought, were discarders of the Colonel Sanders buckets, condom wrappers, and whatever else in the headlong pursuit of vacation pleasures.

OR

Celia and Fred sit in colored metal chairs on the porch, drinking beer, watching the light go down. A dozen kids on bicycles circle the yard, cut through Fred’s lot and driveway, do tricks in the street. Riding endless circles. Some of the kids have clothes-pinned playing cards in the spokes so they make loud flapping noises. Mexican rock is pouring out every car in every driveway. —Girls Travelling

How do stories come to you? Is it setting first? Characters? Or somewhere in between?

FB: Stories arrive from writing. I always start without a clue and find where I’m going as things develop. A scene, an object, a view, an exchange—almost any text gets things started and once started the developments just keep coming. After a time proceeding thus, one has the beginnings of a story, the heart of it, if you’re lucky, and then it can be developed, extended, revised, remade, etc.

DM: This is just a side question, but I also noticed great amount of detail paid to building structures with multiple references to architecture. I was wondering if that was something of interest to you or where that came from?

FB: My father was an architect so we had architecture for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of my young life. And then I studied architecture at university for five years. So, it’s a fundamental part of my so-called life.

DM: You have this knack for summing up a character at the beginning of your story or when the character is initially introduced with a paragraph or a few sentences. Very tight, very vivid imagery. It’s savvy. You don’t need a lot of explanation about the character from that point. The reader trusts that your initial introduction will follow the character to the end. How do you balance those initial summaries while also affecting a change in the character at the end?

FB: This seems to me a natural part of creating a piece, things happen, vantages skew, material is heaped upon the characters and they, well, grow, they become more complicated than they were in the early going, they develop a bit as you add material—context, detail, event—to them, new information, stresses of various kinds, and they kind of blossom. And of course, luck always adds edges.

DM: There are three stories with a character named Ralph and two stories with a character named Agnes (I think I got that right. I did a lot of page-turning between the stories.) and I wondered if these were the same characters at different stages in their lives. There’s an Agnes who decides to have a baby in “Parents” and then another Agnes who is pregnant in “Agnes and Cecil.” I was wracking my brain about these names. And I then I thought maybe I like this vagueness and there’s some intention about these repeated names. Was this just a coincidence? You simply liked these particular names? And then there were multiple characters with German names which got me scratching my head, too. I can’t help but see some pattern. I’m always curious about linked short stories and why authors “return” to specific characters even if they shift between being round characters versus flat characters. I’m still on the fence about E.M. Forester’s take on round and flat characters, though. Help me here. What’s going on?

FB: I don’t have any explanation for this other than I like the name Agnes. The appearance of this character in various stories probably came about from making different stories out of rough material that originally may have been connected. Also, the name has a richness to it that I often want to draw from in the work—call me crazy.

DM: “Girls Travelling” had this sort of cinematic feel to it. I think this is in part because you lean into dialogue which gives a dramatic effect while also but creates a faster pace. “Ray and Judy” and “Cecil and Agnes” are either almost entirely told via dialogue or there are large sections of pure dialogue. This technique has the feel of a script without the structure. Going back to “Girls Travelling,” let’s pretend we are working with a script. Please humor me and don’t fault me here; I don’t write scripts.

First section: INT. DINER NEAR BUS STATION-NIGHT

Second section: INT. DINER NEAR BUS STATION- SAME NIGHT

Fred, Celia, and Em are sitting at the same table they were sitting earlier, only now it’s full of pancakes, has browns, bacon, eggs, coffee. The three have obviously cleaned up. They’re all Spandex and Converse and shirttails. Outside the light is softening.

It reminded me of Hemingway and how he approached dialogue and setting where the reader is almost a character or an observer who is listening in on the characters’ conversations. I suppose it’s near impossible as a short story writer to not be influenced by his writing. Would talk about your technique?

FB: I think I just build stories in some haphazard way that I find convenient and productive for my purposes, which purposes are making a story of some kind that is allowed to go its own way, and this is most important to me. That is, I have no particular idea about a story before writing it. It sort of exposes itself in the making, the sequential adding of material, events, details, elaborations, surprises, etc. And all the time drawing on external sources, bits of material from other stories, or junk on TV, or relationships or various kinds—the whole process is like a slow motion whirlwind, dropping stuff into the story and into the characters, and into the interactions between characters—it’s lovely and entertaining game between the writer and the page, and when it works, well, it works.

Of course, sometimes it doesn’t. Then you try again later.

DM: Congratulations on your collection. It was a real pleasure reading Sun Deluxe and on behalf of Southern Literary Review we wish you the very best.

About the author:

Frederick Barthelme studied fiction with John Barth at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. From 1977 to 2010 he directed the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction and has been published in GQ, Fiction, Epoch, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. His work has been translated into nine languages. His novel Elroy Nights was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.

TO PURCHASE: Sun Deluxe: New and Collected Stories: Barthelme, Frederick: 9781648212178: Amazon.com: Books