With his cartwheeling lists, his jump-cuts, and his love of the daredevil premise, Donald Barthelme tends to dazzle sympathetic readers. But to get a crisp take on his work, we have to go back to Barthelme’s contemporaries, especially his critics, whose anxieties and prevarications tell us a lot about what he meant to the status quo of the 1960s and ’70s.

A symposium in the latest issue of McSweeney’s dedicated to his work declares that “the Donald Barthelme legacy is in a kind of shambles.” But our greatest postwar experimental story-writer is still very much in print — this month, “Flying to America: 45 More Stories” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 344 pages, $26) gathers Barthelme’s many uncollected stories into one neat package. But, as McSweeney’s Justin Taylor notes, there is no proper Barthelme biography, and there is no Library of America edition. “Bellow, Cheever, Updike, Malamud — I hold in the highest regard,” Barthelme said, “I’d be a fool not to.” But he has lost a certain kind of race to Saul Bellow: Barthelme’s tastes were catholic — he didn’t like camps — but he has become a cult writer, and non-fans are not obliged to read him.

That cult is large, but its size only intensifies its opacity. Gary Lutz, Lance Olsen, George Saunders, Frederic Tuten, Robert Coover, and the late Grace Paley all contributed to the McSweeney’s symposium. Lance Olsen confidently lists others who “wouldn’t write precisely as they do without B having been in the world first”: Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Shelly Jackson, Brian Evenson, Dave Eggers, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon have all contributed prefaces to posthumous editions of Barthelme. Taken together, these names constitute a familiar postmodern canon, about which most readers have made up their mind.

Better to read someone from another camp, such as Alfred Kazin, to get a fresh view of Barthelme himself. Kazin, Bellow’s great supporter, called Barthelme an “anti-novelist.” For him, writing in 1973, Barthelme was a social critic doomed to bitterness:

He is wearingly attentive to every detail of the sophistication, the lingo, the massively stultifying second-handedness of everything “we” say. Barthelme is outside everything he writes about in a way that a humorist like Perelman could never be.

Kazin may have been thinking of “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” an early story written in April 1968, months before Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy, or “K.,” as Barthelme calls him, is a robotic decider, an alien hero who fascinates his own friends: “He has surprising facets,” one says. As Kazin suggests, Barthelme uses clichés ironically, to show how little we engage with reality: “The world is full of unsolved problems, situations that demand careful, reasoned and intelligent action. In Latin America, for example.”

Readers such as Kazin shrug at Barthelme’s satire; to them, it is chilly fiction that condemns itself to bitterness and eventual irrelevance. Barthelme himself admitted in interviews that he did not get enough emotion into his stories, that he put in too many jokes. In “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” (1970), a typically philosophical Barthelme story, a therapist accuses his patient of being too ironical. The patient brings up Kierkegaard, who believed that irony is liberating — until the ironist becomes “drunk with freedom” and “what began as a victory eventuates in animosity.” In the end, the patient attacks Kierkegaard, and explains — in a final twist of knowingness and sophistication — that he does so only to defend himself, that he stands accused of irony and that it bothers him. The therapist is helpless to respond.

It is strange but invigorating to consider Kazin’s distrust of such a text. Irony has been a great topic in American letters, and critics are more likely to respond with weariness than with opprobrium. Denis Donoghue, a sympathetic critic, predicted in 1967 that Barthelme’s satires would lose their sting:

“The adversary culture”… will contrive to tame Mr. Barthelme’s lion within a matter of months: the process by which a subversive fiction is possessed by its chosen audience, adversaries to a man, and then turned into a jokebook — we have only to wait and watch this in action.

To the initiated, irony reads as a kind of sincerity, a demonstration of “getting it.” Contemporary readers emphasize Barthelme’s affability. Mr. Eggers, writing in his 2005 introduction to “Forty Stories,” says that Barthelme is “always grinning at you in a warm and very compassionate way.”

It may still surprise some readers to learn that 128 of Barthelme’s 145 stories were published in the New Yorker, but it was a fact that controlled his contemporary reception. Kazin, above, very cannily compares Barthelme to S. J. Perelman. New Yorker standards such as Perelman and James Thurber drew on high-concept references — Thurber, for example, might mock the Freudian idea that machinery can be sexually evocative, referring to “the 1935 V-8 Sex Symbol that I drive.” But they never achieved what Mr. Angell calls Barthelme’s “explosion of reference, this bottomless et cetera.” And where Thurber or Perelman mock, Barthelme inhabits. He lies down on the therapist’s couch and confounds him, on his own terms.

Kazin’s mistake lies not in his failure to get the joke, but in his assumption that the joke was a jeremiad. Barthelme was simply a cosmopolitan man, the son of a modernist architect, who grew up in Texas and found a home in Greenwich Village. He worked with what was at hand; he was not especially interested in mounting an attack on anything. Gore Vidal makes a similar mistake in his notorious 1976 essay, “American Plastic.” By trying to link Barthelme with the French nouveau roman — which Barthelme had 12 years earlier called “a triumph of misplaced intelligence” — Vidal would position him as an American sucker, an earnest import-export man.

Yet it is crucial that Barthelme occupied the echt New York space originally carved out by the likes of Perelman and Thurber. That legacy must have given him great confidence, to be jazzy but also to be smart. In “After Joyce,” the 1964 essay in which Barthelme most extensively addresses his own artistic patrimony, Beckett looms large, but the key near-contemporary for Barthelme is Kenneth Koch, the late poet whose fiction was being published at that time. Like John Ashbery, whom he admired, and Frank O’Hara, Barthelme worked for ARTnews when he first arrived in New York. Ashbery and Koch, along with O’Hara, were called the New York School not out of convenience, but because their postmodern experiments were evocatively urbane, just like the city. Just like Barthelme.

Barthelme once said, admiring Koch, that he dispenses with “character, action, plot and fact, dispenses with them by permitting them to proliferate all over the landscape and by resolutely short-circuiting the expected order of things. There is a continual handling and mishandling of sentimental clichés.” The same could of course be said of Barthelme. He admired Koch for importing American boys’ literature into his narrative chaos, and we can read Koch all over a famous Barthelme story like “The Indian Uprising.”

We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds.. … People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. “No.”

In 1976, Vidal dismissed writing such as that in “The Indian Uprising” as “heterosexual camp.” But it was writing with a future. The duff adjectives, the coy denotation of communal life, and the incomplete pathos of “The Indian Uprising” anticipate much contemporary writing. Suddenly we are back with Ben Marcus and George Saunders.

blytal@nysun.com