Straight from the ivory tower - here's the ultimate, unreadable
academic novel, and, sadly, the fiercest ammunition imaginable for
John Gardner's self-righteous "moral fiction" crusade. In a grand
gesture of self-advertisement and apparent desperation, Barth has
taken characters from five of his six previous books - Todd Andrews
from The Floating Opera, Jacob Homer from The End of the Road,
Adolph Mensch from Lost in the Funhouse, Jerome (Harold) Bray from
Giles Goat-Boy, various descendants of Ebenezer Cooke (The Sot-Weed
Factor) - and he has them all writing letters in 1969: aging Todd
writes to his dead father about the recurring patterns of his life
and his rediscovery of sex with old flame Jane Mack and (probably
incest) Jane's daughter Jeannine; Jacob Homer writes to himself in
the loony bin, obsessed with numbers, anniversaries, and his tragic
past; Bray and his LILYVAC II continue to pursue
fiction-by-computer and write John Barth to threaten him with a
plagiarism suit over Giles Goat-Boy; Adolph Mensch outlines his
plan for a Perseus fiction; and the various Cookes chronicle the
family history from about 1750 to 1820, which takes in Teeumseh,
Byron, Madame de Stael, Fulton, the Burning of Washington, the
Battle of New Orleans, and a plan to rescue Napoleon from Elba. But
the biggest letter-writer of all is a new character, 50-year-old
Germaine G. Pitt (Lady Amherst) - acting provost of Marshyhope
State University, long-ago mistress to Joyce, Huxley, and Hesse
("he liked me to dress in lederhosen"), now the lustily Joycean
mistress of Adolph Mensch, and related in one precious way or
another to all the other characters. Plus: Barth himself writes to
all these folks, asking their permission to put them in his new
book, promising that, through these 88 letters and 864 pages,
"Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising
tide, the plot will surge forward. . . ." Unfortunately, that's not
what happens, despite a highly contrived effort to connect these
characters and bring them together for some
campus/radical/terrorist hoopla. Nor do Barth's much-proclaimed
themes here - life's second cycles, history's "reenactments" - hold
things together; and the comedy/parody is more often strained than
wild, especially since such literary gamesplaying is by now old
stuff (Borges, Nabokov) that's been improved upon by Barthelme,
Sorrentino, and even Woody Allen. What remains is a self-indulgent
mishmash that not only fails but also puts an odd retroactive taint
on the earlier novels: by shoving his past conceits up against each
other, Barth reveals just how frail they all are - and that his
various voices, whatever the ornate embellishments, are essentially
just one wordy, arch, allusive voice. For Barth's fellow academics,
then: an elaborate playpen to crawl around in. For those who know
and love all of the earlier novels - some possible amusement. For
most everyone else - a sorry spectacle, baroque and listless, noisy
and busy and smug and empty. (Kirkus Reviews)
A landmark of postmodern American fiction, "Letters" is (as the
subtitle genially informs us) "an old time epistolary novel by
seven fictitious drolls and dreamers each of which imagines himself
factual." Seven characters (including the Author himself) exchange
a novel's worth of letters during a 7-month period in 1969, a time
of revolution that recalls the U.S.'s first revolution in the 18th
century - the heyday of the epistolary novel. Recapitulating
American history as well as the plots of his first six novels,
Barth's seventh novel is a witty and profound exploration of the
nature of revolution and renewal, rebellion and reenactment, at
both the private and public levels. It is also an ingenious
meditation on the genre of the novel itself, recycling an older
form to explore new directions, new possibilities for the
novel.
General
Imprint: |
Dalkey Archive Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
May 2023 |
First published: |
October 1994 |
Authors: |
John Barth
• Barth John
|
Dimensions: |
232 x 154 x 45mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
772 |
Edition: |
New Ed |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-56478-061-4 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
1-56478-061-9 |
Barcode: |
9781564780614 |
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