What would The New Yorker have done without Donald Barthelme? And what would Donald Barthelme have done without The New Yorker?

These are far from idle questions, for rarely in our time have the careers of a celebrated fiction writer and a leading magazine represented so productive an example of what biologists call mutualism, with each partner serving a significant need of the other. Though it might seem incomprehensible to young readers who know him only for his slight valedictory novel, The King (which he completed shortly before his death in 1989), the introduction of Barthelme’s barbed, idiosyncratic jeux d’esprit into the pages of The New Yorker a generation ago did the same thing for the magazine’s fiction department that the introduction of guitar music into the liturgy did for the Roman Catholic Church at about the same time: namely, it helped a widely venerated institution with a reputation for stuffiness to look, in the eyes of the modish young urbanites whose patronage it sought to retain, as if it were keeping abreast of the age. To be sure, The New Yorker continued to publish well-made conventional fictions by the likes of John Cheever (who deplored Barthelme’s work and complained that the newcomer was “taking his space” in the magazine) and Barthelme’s contemporary John Updike, but readers perceived a change of direction, and it was a direction they identified with Barthelme.

Meanwhile, set in that dignified-looking New Yorker type, and surrounded by all that fastidious New