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Summary
Summary
A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." ( The New Yorker ).
Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair.
He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense.
Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.
Author Notes
Frederick Barthelme, an American writer in the minimalist tradition, depicts in his writings loneliness, isolation, and fear of intimacy in modern life. Born in 1943 in Houston, Texas, Barthelme attended Tulane University and the University of Houston before studying at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts from 1965-66. He worked as an architectural draftsman, assistant to the director of New York City's Kornblee Gallery, and creative director for advertising firms in Houston during the 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, his art was featured in such galleries as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Barthelme's fiction often concentrates on scenes rather than plots. They frequently include "snapshots" of popular culture, such as shopping malls and McDonald's restaurants, to illustrate the emotional shallowness of the late twentieth century. Characters who show their feelings and thoughts through actions rather than language are another aspect of Barthelme's work.
Barthelme began to write fiction in the 1960s, leading to a change in the direction of his life and art. He earned an M.A. in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1977, then became an English professor at the University of Southern Mississippi and the editor of the Mississippi Review.
Barthelme's work includes the novels Two Against One (1988), Natural Selection (1993), and Bob the Gambler (1997), the short story collections Rangoon (1970) and Chroma (1987), and the screenplays Second Marriage (1985) and Tracer (1986).
Barthelme is the brother of the well-known experimental writer Donald Barthelme (1931-1989).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barthelme, a master of minimalist suburbia-set fiction ( Waveland ), returns with a buoyantly offbeat murder tale that doubles as a meditation on everything from contemporary art to Google to mortality. The setting is Forgetful Bay, a condo development in Kemah, Tex., where 50-something Wallace Webster lives alone. His solitary existence is interrupted mainly by visits from Jilly, a younger former coworker of his, and Morgan, his college-age daughter from a failed marriage. Then, a slew of apparently accidental deaths strikes the neighborhood, along with a few other strange incidents--notably, a woman, Chantal White, being doused with Yves Klein blue paint in a guerilla-like attack. After Wallace begins an affair with Chantal, police investigators come to see him, but rather than feeling frightened, he finds their questions oddly reassuring.... Like your life imitating television. Throughout the novel, his narration provides punchy, wry commentary on the banality of pop culture, but the tone is, ultimately, infectiously optimistic. Taking inventory of his neighbors' kitschy lawn statuary, Wallace considers getting a few gnomes or a Virgin Mary of his own. I mean, why not? Where's the harm in a little blind faith, a little hope in the face of the grotesque spectacle of ordinary life in this century? Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
With a divorced male in his 50s living on the Gulf Coast and sorting out various female attachments, this 15th book of fiction from Barthelme (Waveland, 2009, etc.) covers turf similar to that of his last two novels. Wallace Webster occupies a condo in a development called Forgetful Bay in a town halfway between Galveston and Houston in the century's second decade. He's on affectionate terms with four women: his dead first wife's daughter, his living ex-wife, a younger ex-colleague and an age-appropriate casual lover from a neighboring condo named Chantal White. Her rich history will punctuate the book with moments of violence after she's introduced in her kitchen bound by an intruder with picture-hanging wire and smeared with Yves Klein blue paint (Wallace, like the author, was once an artist and knows color). Another neighbor will get a bullet in the head that may be self-inflicted or a parting shot from his wife, miffed perhaps because a woman in a black slip and heels was dancing early one morning in their driveway. Such incidents provide the only significant action and a little mystery in Wallace's otherwise quiet life of navigating among his women and memories, dabbling in questions of faith, love and death. He's "interested in the surfaces" and makes "small pictures, collages, postcards, other almost miniature objects"which is a fair description of Barthelme's craft. The dialogue, while entertainingly clever, presents almost every speaker as tersely ironic and in danger of sounding like Seinfeld via Elmore Leonard. His prose sometimes blossoms, though, as in a description of grade-school nuns "who streamed out of the convent like so many ants the better to look me over and tsk and tsk and click their little black beads." Barthelme doesn't resolve everything for Wallace, and the ending will have book clubs arguing for hours. Understated, seemingly offhanded, Barthelme's writing conveys much about the oddities of contemporary life with warmth and welcome humor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Barthelme (Waveland, 2009), the wily bard of the Gulf Coast, invites us to see life through artist Wallace Webster's acutely receptive eyes. Shocked to be pushed out of the design firm he helped create, Wallace finds himself reveling in the views from his Forgetful Bay condo and enjoying serendipitous visits with his sharp-witted, college student daughter, Morgan, and, Jilly, a considerably younger former coworker. But Forgetful Bay is under siege. Sexy and darkly enigmatic Chantal is tied up and painted blue. Someone is shot. Someone else shoots himself. Detective Jean Darling questions Wallace repeatedly, Jilly's abusive ex seduces every other woman in Wallace's life, and Chantal's tattooed performance artist daughter, Tinker, appears in a nimbus of menace. Yet Wallace, a boardwalk Buddha spellbound by the seedy beauty and high-caloric cuisine of the Texas coast, remains content to let things take their course, however dire. Propelled by staccato dialogue and a soundtrack of trashy television shows, Barthelme's devilishly funny, gorgeously atmospheric, and wryly noirish farce brilliantly poses provocative questions about artifice and reality, loyalty and love, cowardice and valor.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF YOU'RE HOPING to get to know your neighbors in Forgetful Bay, a condo development near the Texas Gulf Coast, you'd better act quickly, since they're going belly up with remarkable frequency. Consider the fate of the nail-salon tycoon, Mr. Ng, who flipped his Mercedes, which promptly burst into flames, or the ex-Marine Duncan Parker, who was planning to lose his Amazon-size wife but by the time the last bullet was fired ended up losing himself. Then, of course, there are the perfectly "normal" deaths brought about by bad hearts and other medical conditions, the kind that were responsible for the collapse of the neighbor found in his car "with the door open and one foot out on the concrete of the garage floor," with "no signs of violence of any kind." But it's not easy distinguishing a normal death from an abnormal one in Forgetful Bay, where only one thing is ever certain - if you're looking to move in, several of the nicer units should be available real soon. It's always a pleasure to be back in the understatedly funny world of Frederick Barthelme, where the central characters lack ambition, nastiness and guile, and the world's mundane terrors come along so predictably and relentlessly you have no choice but to laugh at them. Like many Barthelme protagonists, Wallace Webster is one of Forgetful Bay's inherently unglamorous (and somehow still breathing) residents. Divorced and prematurely retired, he spends most of his scarce social time in the company of women. He stays up nights watching Scandinavian crime dramas on DVD or surfing the Internet for weird information, then sleeps until afternoon and drives out to Target for another iPhone case or falls asleep at Tommy King's Highway Oasis and Car Wash. Wallace has reached a point in his life when the past is "in many ways, more interesting than the present." Which is apparently just how he likes it. But as the death toll mounts and bizarre events proliferate (one neighbor is trussed up with picture wire, painted blue and abandoned in her kitchen; another finds a partly undressed school-teacher dancing in his driveway), Wallace is drawn slowly out of the cocoon of himself and into his randomly hostile condo-universe of death, vandalism and really odd décor. Instead of lying around the house and cultivating his lifetime devotion to cowardice, Wallace finds himself swapping investigative information with a female police detective named Jean Darling and learning more about his neighbors than he cares to. Unlike Kurt Wallander (or even Magnum, P.I.), Wallace doesn't actually care if he gets his man (or his woman). He just wants to stay awake long enough to find out who'll be interrupting his precious solitude next. Will it be his ex-wife, who still keeps a room in his condo? Or his wiser-than-he college-age daughter? Or his potential and perhaps-not-as-platonic-as-she-seems friend, Jilly? Or might it turn out to be that attractive 50-ish new neighbor, Chantal White, who shot at least two former husbands, then passed one of the guns on to her daughter, who, of course, had her own man to deal with? Dating Chantal may be the sort of mistake some men make only once. "There Must Be Some Mistake" often reads like an amusing existential satire of the detective novel, one in which the crimes and misunderstandings escalate without resolution and the convenient Agatha Christie-like "summing up" never arrives in time to deliver the culprits to the cops. This may be because Barthelme, like his characters, appears to feel an aversion to the very idea of resolutions, those faceless implacable forces that eventually take us away from the things that really matter: our cozy condos, possessions, routines and continually irresolvable relationships. Perhaps it's best to inhabit the middle places, Barthelme seems to argue, where life is continually inconclusive. For now. In Barthelme's world, there's no choice but to laugh at the onslaught of mundane terrors.
Library Journal Review
Wallace Webster, a fiftysomething commercial artist laid off from his firm, aimlessly spends his time in his Texas condo development surfing the Internet, watching Scandinavian crime dramas, and hanging around with a bevy of women, including Chantal, a woman with a history; his college-age daughter, Morgan; and his thirtysomething former coworker Jilly. Wallace's relationship with Jilly is nonsexual and undefined, though there seems to be a potential that Wallace is unwilling or unable to pursue. A series of seemingly unconnected deaths and other bizarre events begin to rock the development as Wallace finds it increasingly difficult to juggle his relationships, especially when his ex-wife, Diane, and Jilly's ex-husband, Cal, become involved. VERDICT Barthelme is keenly attuned to the zeitgeist in a way that recalls John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich. Much of the novel consists of the characters having conversations about their backstories, and despite the string of strange events in the neighborhood, one wonders when or if the threads will coalesce into a plot. They do, however, in a way that will move readers to want to reread to pick up the clues missed the first time. The ambiguous ending adds to the fun or frustration, depending on your taste. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/14.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
