SNOW WHITE by Donald Barthelme. 180 pages. Atheneum. $4.50.
Donald Barthelme's work creates the impression that something miraculous happened to him overnight—as if, blind from birth, he could suddenly see, or, fluent only in Urdu, he abruptly grasped English entire. The result is quite an explosion, a staccato burst of verbal star shells, pinwheel phrases, cherry bombs of Joycean puns and wordplays. Such a book is Snow White, an amusingly refurbished fairy-tale novel of the absurd—as episodic and pointless as a slow-turning kaleidoscope, yet just as strangely affecting.
Snow White, "a tall dark beauty containing a great many beauty spots," lives in an unnamed city with seven men —Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem and Dan. When they are not taking showers with Snow White or making love to her, they keep busy washing buildings, carrying money to the vault and tending vats in which they brew Chinese baby food. The men are not dwarfs, but might as well be. Snow White says tartly: "The seven of them only add up to the equivalent of two real men." About all that they have in common, except Snow White of course, is the curious fact that each was born in a national park. Their leader, Bill, is in a slow decline, largely because he went to Bridgeport, Conn., to deliver a powerful statement, but Bridgeport wouldn't listen. Anyway, he is tired of Snow White now, and can't bear to be touched.
As in all fairy tales and most novels, the villains are more captivating than the heroes. Jane, the wicked stepmother, cultivates her malice by writing poison-pen letters. Her equally wicked consort, Hogo de Bergerac, cultivates evil by offering himself as an informer to the Internal Revenue Service.
Finally, there is Prince Charming, a young man named Paul who is much given to writing palinodes in his bath. For her part, Snow White finds him to be more frog than prince. It all winds up when Jane poisons Paul by mistake, after which Bill is tried and executed for vatricide—he let the fire go out under the bubbling cauldrons of Chinese baby food.
A somewhat different version of the story, with a few four-letter words chastely omitted, appeared recently in The New Yorker. Author Barthelme, 36, qualified high among the zanier practitioners of what might be called aleatory fiction when he published his 1964 collection of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari.
Barthelme is a gifted anarchist in the world of words, and he offers no explanation of his purpose in Snow White. As in Alice in Wonderland, there are plenty of inner meanings and symbols to be found—social, psychological, existential, political. But the search for a point is simply not the point, even though midway through the book the author teasingly provides a questionnaire for grimly (or maybe Grimmly) determined readers. Sample yes-or-no question: "Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? What is it (25 words or less)?"
Never mind the metaphysics. In exactly 20 words: No one who reads this jape will ever again feel quite comfortable reading the traditional Snow White to his children.