Barthelme's new collection of short fiction, aptly titled "Great Days," is built on [the] notion of routines and how to play them….

In all cases, the emphasis is on doing a routine, playing out situations as if they were vaudeville acts. In their least pretentious form, bits like these need only the two voices of straight man and comic, and in "Great Days" Barthelme tries his hand at keeping everything else out of the way.

When the technique works, Barthelme's sentences bounce off each other like overpacked dodgem cars, but only because they are strong enough to run on their own, unhampered even by quotation marks (he uses the European style of dashes instead). Seven of the 16 stories in "Great Days" are written this way, and their effect is to underline the purely verbal comedy of Barthelme's art, which now reads like the swiftly bantered exchange in a...