"The best of Donald Barthelme's stories have an exquisite, shimmering beauty. They take immense risks with tone and content; they bathe the known world in the waters of irony, rhythmic energy and exuberant formal trickiness. The systems used in his style are close to the thrilling moments of obscure mystery in John Ashbery's poetry, or to the non sequitur followed by pure sequitur in the plays of Beckett, or to the deadpan radiant perfection in the sentences of Don DeLillo. It is easy for work like Barthelme's, so exciting when it first appears, to date and seem stale, and eventually, on subsequent readings, to become too smart for its own good—but this has not happened with many of the stories. For making it new and strange, he is a heroic figure in modern literature. And, even though fashions have changed and he no longer sits center stage, he remains an important influence, especially in the United States. It is maybe right and fitting that Donald Barthelme the writer arose in response to another exacting presence who also bore his name—his father, Donald Barthelme the architect. The senior Barthelme created important modern buildings in Texas, including the family home on the outskirts of Houston, and spent his life preaching and teaching about the need for a new and uncompromising modern style. ('Be prepared for failure,' he told his son once he had seriously embarked on his career as a writer.) Donald Jr., born in 1931, remembered moving when he was 8 to the house his father had built: it was, he said, 'wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. . . . We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.' The early chapters of Tracy Daugherty's admiring, comprehensive and painstaking biography of Donald Barthelme, Hiding Man, emphasize the challenging education he received in taste and theory from his father and then the brilliant education he gave himself in Houston when he was in his 20s . . . Donald Barthelme was lucky in many ways. He was lucky in the quality of his upbringing and education, lucky, also, to find a home at The New Yorker for work that might have seemed difficult and obscure; he was lucky in love a number of times—his second wife, Helen, especially, emerges in these pages as a wise and affectionate friend throughout his life. He was lucky, too, that he continued to work on his fiction to the end, work that in its very sharpness and newness must have taken its toll. He was also fortunate in the way he could drink, announcing to a friend in the 1980s that he was 'a little drunk all the time' without going through many periods where he was 'falling down.' And he has been lucky, finally, in having a biographer who has not dwelt too much on the darkness in Barthelme's soul, the unevenness of the work or the sadness and messiness of his life. Daugherty, instead, has managed to make a case for a body of work in which the best stories have the aura of a second act, and to create a convincing narrative out of a life that was deeply engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled, despite the demons, and out of a life of the mind that was rigorous, exacting and, despite Barthelme's early death, deeply productive."—Colm Tóibín, The New York Times Book Review

"Not just a modest remembrance but a full-length, meticulously documented study. All dead authors should be so lucky . . . Daugherty was Barthelme's student in the '80s. The last time Daugherty saw him, six months before he died, his former teacher gave him a new assignment: 'Write a story about a genius.' He did, and I'd give it an A."—Steven Moore, The Washington Post

"Like a knowledgeable curator, Daugherty walks us through Barthelme's publications book by book, pausing for brilliant explications of the more challenging stories, such as 'Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,' which comes into sharper focus after Daugherty explains its relationship to a 1931 Jean Renoir film with a similar title. He interleaves this analysis with accounts of the writer's four marriages, affairs, teaching stints and other extracurricular activities in a respectful but not hagiographic manner. (He reveals, for instance, that Barthelme had drinking problems starting at 16, was fiscally irresponsible and smoked so much he died of cancer at 58.) I especially enjoyed Daugherty's fierce defense of Barthelme's works as socially responsible art, not as the aesthetic playthings that some critics accuse them of being. As life became more complicated in the 20th century, and as the media and corporations tried to define reality for consumers, Barthelme felt new tactics were necessary to render and to criticize this future-shocked world. Daugherty quotes from Barthelme's essay 'Not-Knowing' on the writer's 'need to refresh language continually, to keep it free of 'political and social contamination,' safe from co-optation by commercial interests.' While t