Painted Desert

This book concerns media and traveling and cyber-culture. It is about connections where there seems to be a lack of connection because people commit outrageous acts. The main character's friend seeks to right the wrong, but in the midst of the road trip from Mississippi to Arizona, discovers that looking at the scenery and marriage may be more certain avenues of growth.

Perhaps he's an acquired taste, or maybe you just need an attention span longer than a Buzz Clip, but no one writes about real people, real life, and the quiet at the heart of the insane neon whirlwind of modern existence quite the way Barthelme does. He understands the tragedy of the lonely traffic light, the way the sting of salt in the air can smell like renewal, the peculiar magic of parking lots at 3 am, the messy reality of road trips that don't take place in Hollywood movies. Painted Desert, like his other works, is less a conventional novel told to you like a bedtime story and more a glimpse of a particular time and place, a specific person and what they were wearing, the awkward rhythm of a conversation with someone you can never really know well enough. The absence of the standard narrative tropes is disorienting at first, but ultimately liberating: the first time I read anything of his I was unnerved by how immediate it was...months later it still haunted me and I had to go back for more. Painted Desert is like a ride in someone else's mind: come along and take that ride, baby it's all right.

Like so much of Barthelme's work, Painted Desert tracks misfit middle-aged American males through quirky metaphysical journeys into the millennium. His dialogue is clever and always rings true, his characters are charming, and the situations they face are wonderful, surreal, terrifying. His descriptions -- whether of a motel room during a storm, or a car that seems so big its passengers move their stuff from the trunk to the back seat so they won't "be as lonely", are exquisite and revealing. Only Barthelme can juxtapose the portrayal of a world of mindless violence careening out of control, with gentle humour, touching revelation and a sustaining, almost religious optimism: "Putting one foot in the Painted Desert is more satisfying, fulfilling, more rich and human and decent, than all the vengeance in the world. This country is making us into saints, making us feel like saints, and that's worth everything". And reading and re-reading Barthelme's well-crafted work is also well worth it.