Social-Science Fiction

UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES, UNNATURAL ACTS by Donald Barthelme. 170 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Donald Barthelme's game is best described as surrealist anthropology or perhaps social-science fiction. Literature today is overshadowed by audio-visual art forms that threaten to turn into total pinball-machine environments. But Barthelme, 37, continues to demonstrate that language can be a mixed-media production all by itself. He translates the chipped teacups, navel lint, prattle and random static of life into even rows of words that twitter, bong, flash and glow signals of exquisite distress.

These 15 scrupulously crafted stories, all but three of which appeared in The New Yorker, display this ability even better than his controversial crazy-quilt novel, Snow White (TIME, May 26, 1967). In The Indian Uprising, Comanches attack a city whose streets are named Boulevard Mark Clark, Rue Chester Nimitz and George C. Marshall Allee. The narrator is a maudlin drunk who utters battle bulletins and sophisticated banalities with equal apathy. The effect is similar to the sense of unreality created by television when newsreels of carnage run smoothly into advertisements for the good life.

Hut Shrinker. The story beats with the low but constant pulse of loss and dislocation--qualities that are found in greater measure in The Balloon, a wistful meld of love story and art appreciation, and in The Dolt, which tells of a writer who cannot think of middles for his stories. The Dolt is also an oblique comment on the limits of conventional storytelling forms and a squint at the generation gap: the writer's son is an 8-ft.-tall hippie draped with a scrape woven out of 200 transistor radios, all turned on and tuned in to different stations. " Just by looking at him you could hear Portland and Nogales, Mexico." Occasionally, Barthelme gives in to his talent for slickness, as in Report, a tale of technology as mindless process. Among the accomplishments of his scientific elite: an artificial stomach that would enable the people of underdeveloped lands to eat grass, and a hut-shrinking chemical "which penetrates the fibres of the bamboo, causing it, the hut, to strangle its occupants."

Barthelme uses a somewhat blunter instrument in Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, a character study of the politician composed of paragraphs and fragments of popular journalism. Press cliches and pseudo quotes from the candidate are alternated until Kennedy himself seems little more than a collage of newsprint. The story is an exhilarating experiment in the dynamics of hero-making, though its effectiveness depends too obviously on which way the reader's political bias leans.

Nevertheless, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts is an impressive collection by one of the U.S.'s most stylish and original satirists. Indeed, Barthelme tucks into these stories his own credo and best definition. "Fragments are the only forms I trust," says one fractured soul. And elsewhere: "Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.