IT is difficult, initially, to imagine Donald Barthelme as the author of a book for children. It is true that he is best known for a novel called Snow White, but his Snow White has the same sort of relationship to the heroine of the Grimm brothers' tale that Lolita has to Little Nell. It is not merely that Barthelme's Snow White is a fairy tale for adults; it is a fairy tale for over-educated adults. In it, as in his shorter fictions, he displays an acutely painful awareness of what it is like to be a human being living in America in the latter half of the 20th century. Though commendable, this is not unusual; many writers have managed as much. But Barthelme is unique in that he is continually in the process of devising a literary form appropriate to this painful awareness. The apparent irrationality and disconnectedness of Snow White and the shorter fictions, the strangely mixed diction, shifting locations and identities, and incongruous juxtapositions—all these hold a broken mirror up to a world in which, as one of his characters in the early story, "The Piano Player," says, "everything is in flitters." It is not the perception that is new: Yeats tells us much the same thing in "The Second Coming." But Yeats's grave and resonant mode of expression—

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;