Natural Selection

by Frederick Barthelme

Overview

Peter Wexler is 40 and obsessed with what's wrong in the world, including his marriage. Deciding that a change of scenery might help, Peter leaves his wife and their son in search of a resolution to the confusion, estrangement, fatigue, and adultery that have confounded his life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582431314
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	06/22/2001
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Frederick Barthelme was a founding member, with Mayo Thompson, of the art/noise/psychedelic rock band Red Krayola, and a painter and conceptual artist in Houston and New York in the late 1960s. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Fiction, Epoch, GQ, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times, Frank, The Southern Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. The memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, was co-authored with his brother Steven, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded his retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages and his novel Elroy Nights, which was also one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2009 he published Waveland, a novel set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast a year after Katrina. In 2010 he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.

Editorial Reviews

By turns funny and sad, lyrical and antic, dazzling and exasperating, Natural Selection emerges as perhaps Mr. Barthelme's strongest novel yet.

New York Times

With a keen eye, a sharp tongue, and an open heart...Barthelme plumbs the depths of love and marriage in a contemporary American landscape.

Philadelphia Inquirer

As a chronicler of the ranch-tract frontier, Barthelme has an extraordinary ear for the off-key notes being played there.

Boston Globe

Barthelme's bracingly cynical novel of marital discord and midlife crisis in a Houston suburb aches with tenderness and hurt. At 40 Peter Wexler feels ``stuck in the job, in the life, marking time.'' He tells his nine-year-old son things like ``You're small and sort of dumb.'' Coming unhinged, Peter separates from his second wife, Lily, an arts administrator who is adept at baby-sitting his depressions. Before Peter reunites with Lily on their kitchen floor, he will do much soul-searching and make love to her strung-out ex-sister-in-law on the front fender of a Chevy. Not bad for a guy who agonizes over whether his marriage was based on ``frightened-of-loss longing,'' a PR hack who concocts tiny wind-up ape toys for ``ape concept promotions.'' The Darwinian overtones of the novel's title take on a dark irony in the shattering, unforeseen finale, whose senseless violence echoes the angst of all the characters. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Barthelme's fifth novel is about ``the mess we make of our lives every day.'' Chronically dissatisfied narrator Peter Wexler drifts through two marriages and an uninvolving job; existence becomes meaningful to him only when his estranged wife, with whom he's just been reunited, dies in a freak automobile accident. Played out against Barthelme's overly familiar backdrop of shopping malls and subdivisions, Natural Selection is itself uninvolving. We don't know--or care--much more about Peter Wexler at the end of the novel than we do at the end of the first chapter. As his collection Chroma ( LJ 5/1/87) illustrates, Barthelme's forte is the short story.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.

Library Journal