Review: Padgett Powell on Donald Barthelme

When I tried to read Donald Barthelme, anticipating his arrival as a teacher in the fledgling writing program at the University of Houston in 1981, where I was a nearly thirty-year-old fledgling, expecting to meet women but not anyone who might tell me how to write, I could not read him. The stuff—the early stuff in Come Back, Dr. Caligari—struck me as …