The Law of Averages Frederick Barthelme Counterpoint Press 365 pp. ISBN: 1-58243-157-4 Available from Powell's Books.

As in this classic sample, Barthelme catalogs the circus freaks of the human heart, everyday people in their street clothes. As he acknowledges in his introduction to this collection of short stories, his talent is in describing people who live ordinary lives: associate college professors, web site content managers, businessmen. Simultaneously, these men are incestuous siblings, stalkers, sexually repressed philanderers, voyeurs, drivers of lowriders, and change-of-life-crisis sufferers. Additionally, there are a few unifying stylistic factors: the narrator is nearly always a male "I". Barthelme writes women well, but he sees them unequivocally from the outside; he does not inhabit their skins. Water runs through his stories in rivulets, pools, gushes, streams and trickles; either he's an Aquarian, making an Oulipian joke, or water is as omnipresent in his consciousness as the afterlife was for a classic Egyptian. All of the senses are vivid for Barthelme, but none so much as sight; he draws experiences so clearly that after reading about a rainstorm you expect your face to be wet ("She laughs, the muscles in her neck rippling prettily" 153).

The Law of Averages encompasses draws from several of the author's short story collections, allowing the reader to see the calculated growth and change of Barthelme's writing and the development of his visual skill. Barthelme trained as an artist and worked as an exhibition installer for several years in his youth before embarking on his fiction career, and he seems to utilize that training for maximum effect. He describes a low-rider car right down to the mural painted on its sides, complete with the saliva that drips from the mouths of the wolves running rampant on either side of the main figure. He specifies that a shoe store has a sale on French shoes, when it's just a passing mention. The characters in the stories drive Rabbits, Tercels, GMCs: pickup trucks and subcompacts, the kind of vehicles suburban rats use to move from suburban warren to suburban warren.

Barthelme's prose is fairly sparse; it's not littered with unnecessary verbiage. He's definitely hardwired into his environment, paying attention to it -- but not skewered and skewed with the same walleyed, penetrating gaze of the focused yet distant Ray Carver.

The clear description and lean prose allow for a natural, free-flowing discourse between the few characters -- frequently couples -- to inform the reader without telling her anything. It's as easy to draw one's own conclusions about the people inhabiting a story from the manner in which they discuss (as well as the venue: tent, car, hotel room) as from the things they say to each other. Any person could recognise the interchanges as ones that he had taken part in himself -- or if not, ones that a friend had held -- but funnier. Barthelme's wry humour shines through in dialogue, not with the deliberate attempts at charm that other postmodernists display, but with a sly sideways smile that's sphinxlike in its reserve. It's the same strange humour held dear by Southern writers who celebrate the poignantly nutty; perhaps it's an unavoidable choice for Barthelme, who writes of everyman with an ever-present backdrop of Texas and the Delta South.

In addition to the sense of humour that's always tinging these stories' edges, a distinct dinginess permeates them. It may be the faint melancholy that accompanies most of the straight romantic relationships accounted for here; most of them are in a state of breakup or held together with baling wire. You get husbands moving into apartments over garages ("Cooker") and fooling around with the temptations of next-door neighbors, and wives who spend weekends with boyfriends ("Chroma"), or pass the time with female friends as a romantic experiment after being sued for divorce ("Export"). In some of the relationships, the people seem so incredibly damaged that it's a wonder they can stand in the same room, and reading these delicate negotiations, delivered with a hearty grace, is amazing. In "Instructor", a man returns to a small state university for a temporary position as an associate instructor -- the lowest of the low on a university staff food chain -- and also returns to a woman who may or may not be a former lover or a former wife, and who may or may not still love him, and whom he may or may not still love. The only sure thing about the story is its uncertainty, and its messiness -- the human messiness most of us know but are reluctant to acknowledge, perhaps for reasons of general unattractiveness and the underlying partial motivations of fear.

The title story of the piece, falling near the middle of the collection, is most unlike the other stories because it may be the most hopeful, and at the same time the most pathetic. A newly divorced man has one date and one night with his daughter's long unmarried schoolteacher, and that morning, as she fixes him his breakfast, he fondly stares at her back and reflects that "Maybe we fit together. The real way, like people you can't imagine passionate, or passionate together, or who look as if they were passionate once and were done with it. I'd always wondered how those people got together in the first place" (186).

The title's pun -- that the law of averages is what pulled these two people together, with common names and common lives, into a non-passionate passionate relationship -- is reflective of many people. You leave this collection not only knowing you were in the company of an accomplished storyteller, but feeling as if you had just felt all that could be felt at a lackluster suburban block party. It's difficult to determine which is the most attractive aspect here: the chance to spy on your neighbours (and squirm through their pathos), or the chance to hear Barthelme's limpid prose ring in your ears.

-- Jenn Sikes

Counterpoint Press publishes serious literary work, with an emphasis on natural history, science, philosophy and contemporary thought, history, art, poetry and fiction. In the short time Counterpoint Press has been publishing, its authors have received many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and the Harold Morton Landon Prize from the Academy of American Poets.