Hush Hush by Steven Barthelme (review)

Steven Barthelme has a penchant for cats. Cats, cards, and cheaters. Hush Hush, Barthelme’s second story collection, has plenty of all three. In it, Barthelme champions men stuck in dead-end lives; despite their self-destructive choices, they long to connect with someone—a beautiful woman, a dying cat, a dead father—so that life can be about more than just demoralizing work and bad habits. The twenty stories in Hush Hush challenge us to find compassion for these souls adrift.

Barthelme’s stories are admirably concise. Honed to a minimum of plot, description, and interiority, he masterfully conveys intricacies of character with his keen choice of gesture, dialogue, and metaphor. Plus, Barthelme’s lean prose is often tinged with a dark humor that makes us smile in the face of misery. In “Interview,” Terry Quinn abandons a job at a law firm to return to Texas and, eventually, become a car mechanic. Despite enjoying the yuppie success of his old life, Quinn had become restless: “In almost all ways, [it was] an easy, pleasant life, plus profit-sharing, except for the pretending, the sensation of walking around in an extra skin, like some weird deep sea diver who has forgotten why he came here. But it’s not the law, Quinn reminded himself. This is the way I felt in elementary school.”

For Quinn, the switch to car repair is a step toward personal authenticity, but many of the characters in the collection are not so lucky. Instead, they remain quagmired in the monotony and dissatisfaction of their lives. They burn up their days working in a department store, a law firm, a warehouse, or a pharmaceutical company, mystified at how exactly they got to where they are. They dream of some past or future time in which life was, or will be, exciting and worthwhile. In “Tahiti,” Lucas, like Quinn, was a young man with tremendous potential who ended up finding satisfaction as a car mechanic. Unfortunately, meaningful work doesn’t always translate into happiness. Instead, Lucas grows bored with his marriage, tired of adult responsibility, and too apathetic to make changes: “What he really wanted was to make love again, . . . and in the midst of it you didn’t know where you were. Need a new one for that, he thought. New ones are so much trouble.”

As with “Interview” and “Tahiti,” many of the stories in Hush Hush echo one another. In “Telephone,” a character considers how he will feel when someday he gets the call telling him that his father has died, and in the next story, “Bye Bye Brewster,” a man copes with the death of a father figure. In “Siberia,” an eerily brilliant boy longs for normalcy and imagines a far-away fantasyland to which he can escape; in “Heaven,” a woman-turned-angel seems to have found the ultimate escape beyond the pearly gates, but even with Jesus offering a hand, forgiveness doesn’t prove easy. Other stories share details: in four, cats are the last hope for a character’s emotional rescue; several feature lawyers or law students; several others spotlight writers. Some stories share characters: Quinn, in different manifestations, is at the center of four. These similarities of plot, character, and detail entice the reader to search for meaningful linkages, to connect the dots. But instead of forming a unified and coherent whole, the stories are discrete variations on a few key themes.

Several of Barthelme’s favorite motifs appear in “Claire,” a finely wrought and poignant story, which won a Pushcart Prize in 2005. An addicted gambler named Bailey Long wins $16,000 at blackjack and manages to bring the loot home to show to his ex-girlfriend, Claire, whom he still loves. Bailey once cheated on Claire, so she left him and began a new life with her pretty-boy fiancé. When Bailey realizes that even the jackpot won’t win Claire back, he seeks comfort from a stray cat he found in his car. Like so many of Barthelme’s men...