Telling it like it is: William Barton

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William Barton’s Melting in the Sun 

So, to William Barton’s somewhat-fictionalised memoir, Melting in the Sun (2011) - stories from his young life, mostly. Barton comes across as a bright, intense young man, obsessed with science fiction, astronomy - and girls, of course. He grows up in the Virginia/North Carolina area, straddling two worlds: mixing with the dirt-poor, sometimes violent “white trash” kids on one side, and his more conventional peers on the other.

In one story, wandering by himself one sunny afternoon at the broken-down edge of town, he's accosted by an older boy who has previously bullied him. We're talking maybe 12 and 14 years old here. The older boy looks threatening and acts weird, and then asks the young Barton if he can hang out with him that afternoon. Barton helplessly agrees, but takes an early opportunity to escape, running off to meet with his friend at a downtown coffee bar.

It's only later that he discovers that the bully has been diagnosed with cancer and has only a few months left to live. Guilt haunts Barton forever.

In his late teens and early twenties Barton finds no clear career path - it's a string of odd jobs: stripping and cleaning offices, drifting into freelance work as a software contractor. Writing always presses at him, but for years he can't get published.

In a later story, the professional world of publishing is portrayed as cynical and arbitrary. He's approached by a fellow author who calls his work 'filthy'; others accuse him of writing male pornography, of being obsessed with sex, and misogynistic. Barton seems to take these accusations with mild incredulity and contempt: he's writing the truth about the male interior mind and he's being criticised by hypocrites and fools.

Publishers, however, are only interested in sales and the zeitgeist: authors are manipulated and dropped with no warning as fashions change. You are only as good as your last sales figures.

Barton seems always drawn to emotionally-volatile women who make his life difficult - they give him a hard time, cheat on him, and invariably dump him. Relationships confuse him - while he confuses his romantic partners. He’s accused of talking like he’s reading aloud from a book. He’s obsessed with sex (although that's hardly unusual  for young men). However, he never seems to get out of the cycle of dating disasters.

 'The craving for love': an emotion which dares not speak its name to the young masculine mind.

Some of the stories he recounts are bleak, even harrowing. In one, he’s hitchhiking at night in a bad part of town when the driver and accomplice rape his girlfriend while he is held at gunpoint. In another, he’s struck down by some kind of serious infectious disease, barely making the hospital: the medical staff are disparaging and try to eject him when he explains he has no medical insurance. 

It’s not hard to see where Barton’s fiction - and his recurring themes - come from. The world he writes about is harsh, unstable, and largely indifferent to the individual. If Barton was not such a talented writer he'd be just another intelligent oddball, stuck in the margins of society, invisible and unremarked.

Barton's works are very inconsistent: a lot of it is more like therapy-writing - deeply unpleasant to read. But at his best, where his searing honesty is harnessed to the power of higher ideals: we are jolted.

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For those curious about Barton’s fiction, the best place to start is with Acts of Conscience, When We Were Real, and When Heaven Fell. These are books that take the raw material of his life - alienation, desire, trauma, disillusion - and reframe it in the deep interstellar; distance lends perspective.