The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Returns by Dennis BaroneBrian Evenson
Dennis Barone. The Returns. Sun & Moon, 1996. 89 pp. Paper: $10.95.
The latest installment in Sun & Moon’s New American Fiction Series, Dennis Barone’s The Returns continues in the vein of the linguistic manipulations of his Abusing the Telephone. The stories here, however, seem to have more range and cohesion, Barone often willing to allow the reader a sturdy thread of sense and story to pursue through a varied lingual landscape.
The book begins with “The Tower of Babel,” which serves at once as a sort of invocation of the muses and a credo justifying the deformations and refor-mations in the stories that follow. All of the stories are conscious of form and several of the stories seem consciously placed early in the book so as to educate readers on how to approach what follows. “Only Half” ’s title, for instance, gives away the formal device of the story, which presents us with only part of a line of dialogue before going on to the next line. In this case, the formal device seems to be the main interest of the story; in other pieces, however, formal manipulation is less intrusive and supplements rather than replaces the other elements of fiction.
Of the stories in the volume, the most successful are the shorter pieces—Barone has a more difficult time sustaining his conceits and manipulations in the longer pieces (except for the very effective “Didi and Herman” and, perhaps, the second half of “The Middle Distance”), and in the longer work the deformations begin to feel almost like impositions on the reader. Shorter pieces like “Boy” and “The Returns,” however, are much more effective and intriguing. With thirteen of the sixteen pieces in the volume being short-shorts, there is much here to provoke interest. [Brian Evenson]