My, we are literary this morning. (We promise the PhotoShoppe post will be pure visual pizazz, with only a modest side-order of snappy, to-the-point design writing.) Just when you thought you’d read everything there was to read about the new Donald Barthelme biography, leave it to Colm Toibin to surprise you. Hiding Man, as the Barthelme bio is called, traces the celebrated (what are they calling him this week? Avant-garde satirist? Meta-fiction pioneer? American surrealist?) novelist from his unusual childhood in Texas, through his first stirrings of interest in modern art, to his flowering of fame in the 60’s as a short story writer for the New Yorker—and on to his unfortunate decline into relative obscurity prior to his death in 1989.

Previous reviewers of the book have hardly failed to note that Donald Barhtleme was not the only Donald Barthelme. His father, who was also Donald, was a modernist architect of some stature. Lorrie Moore noted in the NYRB,

The ultramodern architecture of Barthelme’s childhood no doubt lent him confidence and comfort with the ultra-contemporary literary object.

And how! But Toibin, in the New York Times Book Review, tells us that Barthelme Major constituted an important influence not just for his ego but for his “uncompromising modern style.” Donny Jr. received a “challenging education… in taste and theory from his father.” The Times even gives us a photo of the Barthelme home, designed by the pater familias, which looks to be a pleasantly uncluttered specimen of mid-century Good Life modernism.

All of which reopens an old question: How does the writer’s environment affect their literary style? T.C. Boyle (as we all bloody know by now) lives in an innovative Frank Lloyd Wright house, but produces numbingly conventional novels. Poet John Ashbery turns out abstruse meditations on death and pogo sticks, but prefers a quite conventional Victorian rambler. (We hear there may be trouble with the house, though—that’s on the QT.) ‘Tis a puzzlement. What kind of writer, now in short-pants, might emerge from Rem’s Villa dall’Ava?

The Story Artist [New York Times]