SOURCE: A review of Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, in Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1997, pp. 843-44.

The following is a negative assessment of Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme.

What Thomas Pynchon called "Barthelmismo" is somewhat lacking in [Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme] the second posthumous collection edited by Herzinger of Barthelme's miscellaneous writings, which here includes film and book reviews, art catalog essays, and New Yorker pieces.

"Barthelme Takes On Task of Almost Deciphering His Fiction" ran the New York Times headline when Barthelme delivered a lecture for New York University's Writer at Work series. That headline could equally well describe many of these abbreviated critical pieces and not wholly forthcoming interviews. The often-reprinted "Not-Knowing" (1982) is a spirited, idiosyncratic analysis of creativity—the search for an adequate rendering of the world's "messiness"—as well as a playful, sometimes self-parodying literary...