NEAL BARRETT JR.

Hemingway once said that all American literature begins with a book called Huckleberry Finn. What he meant by this (and you can take my word for it; I was an English major) is that the richest, the most original, the cleverest and quite often the best American writing is both regional and vernacular--rooted in the talk of the South.

The South, like Science Fiction, has very flexible boundaries. It's been called a state of mind, but it's actually an intonation, an angle of approach, an accent if you will. It includes scraps of Maryland, most of Kentucky, the bootheel of Missouri (and thanks to the river, the tube socks all the way up to Hannibal), and grandest and most aggravating of all, Texas, which has the peculiar distinction of being at the same time a Deep South state and a Border state.

Which brings us back to literature, for the American novel's South (Faulkner, like Billie Holiday, is an influence without imitators) is a Border South; an edgy, an Upper or a Western South: poor in spirit, polyester in texture, trashy and talky, sexy and steeped in Sin; a weedy garden easier to rob than tend. (Forget the myth that stories hover ready-made in the Southern air like mosquitos or traffic copters; in fact, they were used up long ago, reducing writers to making up new ones.)

Which brings us back to Science Fiction, the most influential and at the same time most despised genre in modern American literature; a close-to-the ground field that has always welcomed experimentation but has only recently (let's admit it) made room for the kind of complex literary writing that distinguishes the best American prose from Twain through Flannery O'Connor to Charles Portis to today.

Which brings us to Neal Barrett, Jr.

I came late to Barrett's work, and not via his gleaming (and fast) V-8 tail-finned masterpiece, The Hereafter Gang. It was the short fiction. Prowling through the pulps one afternoon, I read an incandescently loopy Cinderella tale called "The Perpetuity Blues" and I thought I had discovered another writer as hooked as I was on happy endings. (I was wrong but that's another story.)

I read it again, then called my friends and got, "where have you been?" (I just discovered Utah Phillips last year.) But the fact that I had like Columbus stumbled onto an already discovered strand didn't diminish my own pleasure. My next Barrett thrill was the dark and menacing "Diner" which hangs in the air like an unanswered call for help. Then came the spectacular "Cush," an funereal encounter with the blind hogs of fate that out-o'connors O'Connor herself.

It kept getting better. Much as I admired the ideas, the humor, the rumor and the roar, I had to keep reminding myself: "It's the writing, stupid." Read the opening lines of "Belle Fourche" if you ever admired Hemingway's weather reports. Careful writing sets a tone, and Barrett's stories all sing. He's particularly good with margins, edges--dawn ("before the earth changed hands and the sun beat the desert flat") and dusk ("the sky settling into a shade inducing temporary wisdom."). This kind of work might not get you a seat on the inaugural platform, two butts down from the President, but it will win you Immortality, which is almost as good.

I finally got to hear Neal Barrett, Jr., read--in Texas of course. Even there, amid the Bradley Dentons, Bruce Sterlings and Howard Waldrops, he shone like a star. (What's with these Texans anyway? How come they always tell the best jokes, write the best stories, and get all the credit? It has always kind of pissed me off. Which is why I wrote two books in which there is NO TEXAS AT ALL, only a long, windswept Oklahoma/Mexico border. But that's another story.)

Barret is both a faux primitive and a high modernist. Like Portis, he has mastered the low cadences of mule, of car, of common speech. Like Lafferty (another south/westerner) he has turned high rhetoric on its head. He can write from top down and bottom up at once, and break most (if not all) of the rules. How many writers are willing to switch POVs in the middle of a short story (as Chekhov and Carver twirl in their graves)? Or undress Emily Dickinson? Or put Wilbur Wright to work sweeping out a cantina?

And so I commend to you this book which contains at least two of the stories that will make 20th Century's short fiction final cut. Not with the tired dictum that Barrett is a serious writer in SF drag--surely after Dick, LeGuin, Russ, Wolfe, we no longer have to suffer that sorry disclaimer. Rather, I would remind you that just because these stories sing with what Alfred Kazin called the "exalted naturalness" of authentic American literature, don't think that they somehow aren't really SF.

There's a scientist and a girl in every one, almost.

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