Barth vs. Nabokov

Not long ago I read every single John Barth book in chronological order, and I didn't like what I discovered. My basic conclusion was that, after a certain point, he started using the same characters, style, and list of obsessions in every single book.

The worst aspects started happening with the publication of "Chimera" in 1972, which introduced the characters he'd beat to death over the next thirty years: a man and a woman, highly sexed and of above-average intelligence and education, engaging in cute and explicit discussions about their sex lives. These discussions are always goofy, alliterative, and full of puns. What's more, the Barth narrative style post-Chimera is almost exclusively expository, and usually the narrator is also the author.

These are perfectly good storytelling techniques in themselves, but my beef is that John Barth used them almost without exception. I found this SO distasteful that I've vowed never to buy another of his books.

This week I decided to re-read Vladimir Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor." I've only read it once before -- about fifteen years ago -- and I remember being totally in love with it...but it's driving me BONKERS.

Why? Because IT CONTAINS THOSE JOHN BARTH CHARACTERS! It is (among other things) the story of the relationship between Van and Ada, two highly-intelligent and highly-sexed individuals who talk endlessly about their sexual relationship in a cute, alliterative, pun-filled way. And it's written in an expository style in which the authors are...Van and Ada themselves.

Seriously, reading "Ada or Ardor" is like reading a long-lost John Barth novel, right down to the fact that the main characters say "et cetera" and "tant pis" (which Barth's characters also do, constantly, pointlessly, in every book).

I said at the beginning of this post that Barth started writing this way in 1972, with the publication of "Chimera." You won't be shocked to learn that "Ada or Ardor" was published three years previously...and that Barth is an acknowledged Nabakov fan.

Now, I don't have PROOF that John Barth enjoyed "Ada or Ardor" so much that he basically spent the rest of his life re-writing it...but it sure as hell seems that way. And do you know what the real shame is? That bastard has ruined this book for me. Every time I read a sentence like this--

Could he find the right words: not to hurt Ada, while making her bed-filly know he despised her for kindling a child, so dark-haired and pale, coal and coral, leggy and limp, whimpering at the melting peak?

--I want to scream and write a hateful letter to Nabakov, even though he did it FIRST. And he's dead.

BARTH

Last year at this time I subjected myself to a gruelling "Barthathon," an attempt to read every John Barth book in chronological order. Read the posts if you want to know how THAT turned out.

I can't see myself ever reading another book by Barth, but I DID run across an interesting thing in "The Best of Creative Computing," published in 1976.

Anybody who grew up during the beginning of the 8-bit personal computer glut will remember those awful BASIC programs that tried to be INTERACTIVE. Written at a time when average people were still getting used to the idea of computers in general, a program that would ask you your name and then play "Guess My Number" seemed like magic...

...until you learned a bit of BASIC and saw that it was just smoke and mirrors. Those programs were intended for absolute beginners who had no idea about how computers worked, and I imagine even those beginners got sick of the concept pretty quickly (though "ELIZA" and "Animal" were special).

In the quest to make computers friendly, programmers in the '70s often tried to make them seem creative, at the same time tossing an educational bone to keep their programs from getting deleted off the mainframe. Larry Press' article "Computers in the English Curriculum" absolutely reeks of this stuff.

Page two of the article shows the output of a program called "BARTH," meant to emulate some of Barth's interactive-reader experiments from the '70s. It's much the same as all the other programs of its type -- enter verbs, nouns, and adjectives, which are embedded into print statements to create a nonsense story -- but DOES have the distinction of being perhaps the only John Barth video game ever created.

Incidentally, Margaret Chisman's "Producing Computer Poetry" is another example of creative-educational computer blah, notable most for how far we've come in our concept of computing (and how quickly we lost our naivete). My favourite article in that issue of Creative Computing, however, is one by Wes Thomas, in which he becomes extremely annoyed by precocious children at a computer fair.

This is SO bizarre:

The Barthathon "Where Three Roads Meet"

Okay, the Barthathon is finished. I'll wrap it up at the end of this post, but I've already said pretty much everything that I have to say about John Barth and his writing.

I'm glad that I won't need to read anymore of his books, and perhaps you're glad that you won't need to read my reviews of them.

I'll admit up-front that I couldn't wait to FINISH "Where Three Roads Meet" (2005) before I'd even STARTED it. What began as a joy back in July -- reading all of Barths books in chronological order -- had become a painful chore, and one that I wasn't getting anything out of except lessons in what NOT to do when writing fiction, and also shooting pains in my esophagus.

So I am totally unable to view "Where Three Roads Meet" in any sort of objective fashion, other than to snarkily tell you about the game I invented.

I call this game "What Sort of Crap Will John Barth Throw At Me This Time?" To play it, write a list of all the stereotypically overdone Barthian themes you can think of (excluding ones explicitly stated on the jacket write-up, like the "Ur-Myth" in this case), and then jot down when each theme appears. When you have discovered all but ten themes, rip the book in half.

Feel free to play this game yourself. Here's my tally, with the page numbers they first appear on:

• The Chesapeake: 3
• A muse is invoked: 3
• The fiction is ABOUT fiction: 3
  
• Narrator is also the protagonist: 3 (the book starts on page 3, after all).
  
• Telling stories: 3
  
• Impossibly long infodump: 4-25 (merely the FIRST part of the FIRST infodump; of the three novellas in the book, the first and third are ENTIRELY infodumps. Barth, YOU SUCK).
• Protagonist is a teacher: 4
• A character's parents are both well-off professional types (teachers, lawyers): 5
• A character's infodump includes a detailed history of their education: 5
  
• Scheherazade: 7
• Narrator says "et cetera": 9
  
• Descriptions of the alcohol that everybody is drinking: 13
• Narrator says "anon": 15
• A parent goes crazy, ends up in an institution, dies: 15
  
• Somebody says "faut de mieux": 15
• Inappropriate use of prefix "afore-": 19.
  
• Twins: 22
  
• A character peppers their speech with Yiddishisms, and then clarifies that they aren't actually Jewish but, you know, they like the words: 23
• Somebody makes an obvious pun, and then the narrator explicitly points the pun out to the reader ("so to speak," "sorry for that," etc): 31
• A character is, fortunately, old enough to avoid WWI but too young for WWII: 32
  
• Inappropriate use of suffix "-eth": 35
• A character wonders "who ARE we?": 44
  
• Sodomy: 45 (not as pronounced as in most of his books, but it's still there, of course).
• Abortion: 47
  
• A list of "current events" appear in order to supposedly flesh out an infodump's time period: 49
• Narrator mixes metaphors and then says "pardon the mixed metaphor": 51
  
• Menstruation: 52
• Character has multiple names: 64
  
• Narrator describes self as "Yours Truly": 64
  
• Somebody says "tant pis": 67
• Another painful explanation of "ground situation" and "dramatic vehicle": 70 (of all Barth's themes, this one is the most inexcusably repeated during his "late period")
• "The story of our lives is not our lives": 80
  
• Musings about the world perhaps ending soon, usually following one of those "current events" lists: 81
• The inability to inject the necessary conflict into a story turns out to actually BE a necessary conflict: 99
  
• Young woman, older man: 107 (though not REALLY; the young/old connection is not so pronounced here)
• The "Barth Female," that is, a woman who is achingly beautiful, highly sexed, and so intelligent and well-read that she even says "tant pis" occasionally: 113 (All three characters in the final story are bonafide "Barth Females").
  
• A woman has an experimental lesbian affair: 155

I admit that thirteen of those themes are ones that I hadn't thought about beforehand, and only noticed when I came across them. I include them in exchange for all the other themes I DIDN'T include, basically because my writing hand was getting tired.

Did I rip the book in half? No, because it didn't contain sailing, a trip to Spain, a youthful tragic sexual experience, a declaration that "we're fortunate to be this age, in these circumstances, in this country", any of Barth's Chesapeake scenery (loblolly pines, Canadian geese, spartina), a water message, a detailed list of a character's prior residences, cute pillow-talk, meditations on The End of Literature, an increasingly impotent older male, a character who is obviously Shelly, Zeno's paradox, the "coastline measurement" stuff, or a time paradox involving writing.

Which means that, wow, this book is BREAKING NEW GROUND!

So, should you read John Barth? Yes, you certainly should. Ping-pong back and forth between his works, making sure not to read any that were published consecutively (with the exception of "Sabbatical" and "Tidewater Tales," which should be read "as a whole).

Also, perhaps, find it in your heart to love the old guy a bit. Someday I'll be able to do that...but not now.

On with the (different) story!

The Barthathon: "The Book of Ten Nights and a Night"

I've said it before, I'm saying it again: Barth fans, DO NOT READ ALL OF HIS BOOKS IN SEQUENCE.

You might say that this should apply to ALL authors, not just John Barth. If I had been doing a "Pynchon-athon" or a "Coover-athon" or a "Janowitz-athon," would I not be in the same state by this time, cursing the author's stylistic and creative shortcomings?

Maybe, but probably not to this extreme. Barth's wincingly-bad flaws involve a combination of three things: an obsession with themes that he has already explored ad nauseum, an expository writing style in which the narrator is constantly explaining events (always in exactly the same way), and an extremely narrow range of characterization.

This becomes most painful in "The Book of Ten Nights and a Night" (2004), because its eleven collected stories are rapid-fire, compressed examples of Barthy-badness which -- due to their quick repetition -- drown out the good stuff that is supposedly the point.

The first two stories are the oldest tales and so, unsurprisingly, are the also the best...they pre-date his locked-in style. "Help!" is a funny, moving, wildly experimental representation of a musical composition, and "Landscape: The Eastern Shore" is a refreshing taste of Barth's modernist writing: a good story told well.

But as you read the subsequent stories you -- winding up an exhausting Barthathon -- begin to realize that Barth has done exactly the same "things" in every piece he's written since the '70s, and as you continue to read you start to make a game of predicting what will happen next, AND YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT.

Each story will:

1. Start with a tantalizing glimpse of what the narrator is obsessed with.
2. Introduce the narrator's significant other.
3. Go into a tiresome, extended "infodump" that describes the entire chronological history of the narrator and his wife, with particular emphasis on the schools they've taught in and their deteriorating ties with their offspring.
4. Narrator talks exactly like John Barth, even though his name is not actually John Barth ("tant pis," "faut de mieux," prefixing words with "afore-" and ending them with "-eth").
5. Occasional lists of world-wide political events, with a focus either on "things are getting worse" or "gosh we're fortunate to live in this time/place."
6. Mention of threadbare Barth themes (coastline measurement, Zeno's paradox, fiction/time paradox, writer's craft).
   
7. (Hidden somewhere in this portion of the story is "the good stuff" that the story is actually about).
   
8. Narrator's significant other chuckles good-naturedly about Narrator's silly obsession, even though that obsession ultimately reveals some Important Human Truth.
   

As fun as it is to constantly "win" while playing this game, it's actually beginning to make me ANGRY. I cannot BELIEVE that a professional can WRITE like this...ESPECIALLY not a person who spent most of his life TEACHING CREATIVE WRITING.

What is PARTICULARLY amusing (and heartburn-inducing) is that the stories are punctuated by conversations between the storyteller and the obligatory "Super Coolinest Barth Female," in which she keeps imposing conditions to PREVENT him from becoming repetitious -- no more stories about infidelity, no more stories about authors -- and yet she never once addresses the REAL reptition: no more expository stories, structured identically, starring identical characters who differ only in name.

This means that Barth retains a healthy criticism about SOME of his writing, but somehow the REALLY bad stuff escapes his notice (or he doesn't care to address it).

The final REALLY REALLY amusing (and headache-inducing) moment is the last story, which is ONE LONG INFODUMP about the aforementioned Super Coolinest Barth Female. I knew what was coming from the very beginning: she's the child of upper-class professionals? Yup. Strange obsession with Jewish culture? Yup. Traumatically sodomized as a teenager? Of course! Intelligent, literate, thin, beautiful, high sex-drive, attracted to her professor, terminally damaged but still functional and therefore worthy of immense respect? You got it! All that's missing is a lesbian affair, a sailboat, and the revelation that she's a metaphorical Scheherazade.

(She can't be Scheherazade, you see, because in this case that part is being played by John Barth himself, and not even HE can work TWO Scheherazades into a plot...yet).

Do I sound snarky? YOU sit down and read his books, all in a row, and tell me what YOU discover. What *I* have discovered is a writer with terrific ideas who, just before the middle of his career, became increasingly obsessed with themes that he has since milked dry, and who long ago stopped giving a damn about his writing style and his characters.

I've also discovered that fiction can make me emotional, for all the wrong reasons.

The Barthathon: "Coming Soon!!!"

In "LETTERS," John Barth gave us -- among other things -- a struggle between his own media (literature) and the media he felt threatened most by at the time (film). The Ambrose Mensch Barth-surrogate character was constantly struggling with avant-garde film director Reg Prinz, who had utter contempt for words and wanted only to deal with images. Who won the struggle in the end? That's impossible to say, what with all the explosions and the mass-impregnating bug monster.

In "Coming Soon!!!" (2001), Barth seems worried about a newly threatening trend: hypertext fiction. The "Novelist Emeritus" Barth-surrogate character is constantly struggling with e-fiction author Hop Johnson (the "Novelist Aspirant"), who has utter contempt for the linearity of "p-fiction." Hop and Barth compete to see who can be first to finish their respective versions of "Coming Soon!!!", writing both in their own styles and also parodying each other's styles. Soon the novels are cross-pollinating, plot twists are introduced and then defeated, the battle between Aspirant and Emeritus is joined.

Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? So why does the book SUCK?

I tried to read "Coming Soon!!!" back in 2004 (I know the date because a receipt for "Quiznos Subs" was tucked inside for a bookmark) and I put it down shortly into the second part: I thought it was stupid and annoying. Now, with a greater grasp of Barth's concepts and a greater knowledge of literary criticism in general, I can say...it's STILL stupid and annoying, though partly for different reasons.

You see, I already know most of Barth's tricks by now. I know about his wordplay and his tropical storms and his author-writing-about-the-future-as-the-future-catches-up-with-him stuff. I know this because he's performed these same tricks in every book since 1972 ("Chimera"). His old tricks are boring -- and insufferable due to their dull repetition -- and very little is new in "Coming Soon!!!"

The real problem is that the new stuff that IS in "Coming Soon!!!" -- the fake hyperlinks and buttons, the "put on a show" theme, the duelling narrators -- is almost totally uninspired, cliched, and pat. These energetic, wacky, youthful, horny thespian characters all sound exactly like John Barth does, except perhaps on speed and sucking helium and a tad hornier. They all talk in that impossible, goofy, dippy, Barth-being-sexy-cute manner, maintaining all of his "et ceteras" and "them-wards" and "tant pis's," and calling womens' breasts "bubs."

To make this totally painful, the character with the most obnoxious speech pattern -- Hop Johnson -- is the co-narrator. And since all of Barth's books are 99% exposition, we're left to wade through paragraph after paragraph of totally unappetizing crap like this:

And so the search went on for a dramatic chef d' ouevre to follow the Follies: a search that Narrator right readily joined out of his growing general commitment to TOFO II and, more particularly, his ongoing lustful fascinadmiration withof Ms. SMcAS. (What made the woman who Made It Hop tick? How could so multitalented and physically striking an all-'round wowser futz her life away in D'town-on-Ch'tank, aboard funky floundering T II, and in occasional bed with no better than the likes of Yrs T -- and, maybe, Cap'n Elva K?)

The subject of these paragraphs is Ms. Sherry McAndy Singer, she of "those eyes those eyes," the Barth-typical slim, gorgeous, intelligent, talented, take-it-up-the-butt, terminally menstruating, "scarred-by-abusive childhood" female lead who -- you guessed it -- BECOMES SCHEHERAZADE!!! Because we all know that Scheherazade is the most sexiest, admirable, and resonant literary character ever-ever-ever, so resonant in fact that Hop -- who has no interest in traditional literature -- wants to name his daughter after Scheherazade's resilient, equally-resonant, sooper-coolinest and no-doubt-sexy younger sister.

You know how much I hate all this.

So you've got two narrators doing their level-best to out-annoy the reader. You've got the usual handful of Barth character traits (the earthy lesbians, the Jewish characters who pepper their speech with stuff like "they're all meshuggenehs!"). You've got at least thirty pages devoted to blow-by-blow descriptions of the minutiae of sailing, which we've already read a hundred times before. You've got many, many more pages devoted to blow-by-blow descriptions of the scriptwriting and show-planning activities of a bunch of annoying horndogs on a boat...who we only know are talented because the narrator says "wow, they're talented!" You've got Barth and his sexy, coolinest, sadly-not-Scheherazade wife...sailing around...again. You've even got Barth stretching his offensively tin dialect ear beyond mere Jewishisms and into cockney, Italian slang, watered-down ebonics, and tidewater y'all-ing.

"Coming Soon!!!" is an obnoxious, go-nowhere mishmash of nothing. It's boring. It's self-indulgent. It's the same-old. I am losing faith.

Is there anything GOOD about the book? Only the mildly interesting battle between the Aspirant and Emeritus, which sputters in and out of the plot before fizzling entirely near the end. It's interesting to note that Reg Prinz and Ambrose Mensch never resolved their film/lit conflict, but Barth's p-fiction beats Hop's e-fiction hands down.

Inspiration...None

Nope, I haven't updated much lately. Sometimes I feel demon-driven to post entries, and other times -- like now -- I don't.

It doesn't help that everything I'm doing at the moment would sound dull, lifeless, and repetitive if put into a blog entry. Do you (the reader) care about my almost being finished John Barth's novel "Coming Soon!!!"? Probably not, but don't worry, you'll see a post about it soon.

Do you care that Rudolph (the squirrel) thumps himself down on my balcony every morning, but that he doesn't actually eat the peanuts I give them...he just stuffs them in his mouth and go hides them somewhere? No skin off your nose, I'm sure!

How about my latest project: to paw meticulously through the 100-odd master tapes & CDs, mix-down tapes, and 4-track sample collections with the aim of cataloging and digitizing them all? Do you care about the forgotten odds-and-ends I'm finding? Hardly!

So please don't fear that this blog is "languishing." It's just going through one of its periodic quiet periods. I DO have things I'd like to write about, but they either take more preparation than I have energy for or they're too much like other things I've just written about.

I'm sure we can all sleep easier now.

"On With the Story Again!" or, An Imaginary Sailing Trip with John Barth

(For Shelly)

"Ahoy there, Novelist Emeritus!"

"Yrs Truly! Welcome aboard, Muffy S.B.! Only soft-shoes on deck, please, and no cigarettes."

"I don't smoke."

"When famous South American novelist and great personal inspiration Jorge Luis Borges met me at a dinner seven-several years past..."

"No frame-tales, you promised!"

"I'm sorry, Muffy...all of us have a Scheherazade's worth of life stories, and storied lives, and lives of our living life stories. It gets so a man repeats himself after his allotted three-score years and ten."

"Shall we sail?"

"Into the mighty Choptank to the tune of Handel's 'Water Music,' prefiguring the unique salinity of these shrinking estuaries. Did you know, M.S-B., that the salt content in these murky waters is identical in composition to uterine fluid, and also to--"

"--human tears?"

"You've read my books!"

"Tant pis!"

"Ah, my books, those offspring of mine launched like self-aware sperm towards the confluence of--"

"Shut up! Weigh the anchor!"

"Mizzens, engines, swing, top-sails, cutters, masts, et cet!"

(anon)

"It's beautiful out here. No wonder you write about it so much, Mr. J.B., Novelist E., et cet."

"The challenge for this J.B. N.E. E.C. with his bruised and battered binder is to find new ways of setting the above-water scene, so to speak. There's some spartina, for instance, next to the Canadian geese, behind that stand of loblolly pine."

"To the right or the left of the osprey's nest?"

"Wye?"

"Why what?"

"We're at the Wye, the parting of the streams...or the joining, depending on how you look at it! We're at the place where it all comes together and decisions are made!"

"I thought we were at the Axis Mundi..."

"I don't write about that stuff anymore! No, this is the meeting of masculine and feminine, the spot where my second wife and I traditionally come to a likewise meeting of minds, the woman and is-a-man make late-life love and love-late lust despite the knowledge--"

"--foreshadowed by Tropical Storm X, and by the narrator's foreshadowing of the foreshadow..."

"--that the woman of us is on the edge of becoming first-hand offended and then-hand 'teary-eyed.'"

"Blam! Blooey! Since we're at the Wye, I suppose we have to decide whether to go right or left?"

"Not necessarily, M.S.B.! We could go back--"

"--in order to go foreward--"

"--or we could take the FOURTH route, that surprising-the-first-time-I-thought-of-it-but-now-sort-of-predictable direction, that is, to stay motionless here, to freeze-frame, here halfwise struck and arrow cocked forever-ever-after-ward..."

"To take a pee-break?"

"Don't forget to pump the head! In the meantime I'll open up a Beck's Genuine Dark and splash the first gulp over the side for Poseidon, adding my contribution and yours to the unique salinity of these Choptank waters, so close to that of uterine fluid. And tears!"

"You shouldn't drink if you're not at anchor, and if you don't have sufficient swing in the face of the projected blam of TSX, and the projected (expected) 'teary-eyed' blooey."

"I'm not drinking, I just wanted to mention my Beck's Genuine Dark. Hey look, it's a floating water-message, plus my boina!"

"It must have come from that marshy triangle of overgrown wilderness we just passed, behind that wall of recycled rip-rap."

"We'll go back and rap about the ripping of that rap, oh M-S-B."

"No way, I know what happens in those marshy triangles! No soixante-neuf for me!"

"Tant pis, et cet, though it would be dramaturgically correct, my forty-odd years older, you in your prime, muse retired and the woman-of-us at home. Let's pay off our narrative debts and fire the pistols we hung up in Act Zero, and isn't that wacky, an 'Act Zero.'"

"You sexy, increasingly soft somebody-or-something former professional prof."

"Mmm."

"Here? In the end?"

"Mmm, she said..."

"...in..."

"'The End'..."...

...

"PUMP THE HEAD!"

The Barthathon: "On With the Story"

My reviews have made it sound like I don't like John Barth. Let me clarify that I really LOVE his writing -- and I think he's probably a fabulous guy -- but there are certain things about his BODY OF WORK that I find painfully annoying (repetitious characters/themes/situations, dippy pillow-talk, and Scheherazade-aphilia in particular).

The thing is, a book can be perceived in many ways, only one of which is as a part of an author's collected work. "On With the Story" (1996) can be viewed as "part of the whole" -- it expands on many of the thought experiments that Barth toyed with in "Further Fridays," in particular Zeno's paradoxes and the distinction between a person's life and a person's story. It has its fair share of overdone Barth characterizations and people do, indeed, go sailing around on sailboats. Quite a lot actually. And some of the story conceits are self-defeatingly tricksy ("And Then One Day..." and the title story in particular).

But the tales in "On With the Story" often break from tradition in refreshing ways. The general theme of the tales is that of grief and suspension -- stretching out "the good times" can be nice but may only postpone the tragedy. The people in these stories aren't just sailing around wondering if they should have children or if they should have a divorce...they are dealing with (or trying to deal with) death, loss, awfulness, and the last good days, weighty topics that Barth hasn't explored since the beautiful final chapters of "Letters."

In the middle of this is the book's high-point: "Stories of Our Lives," which moves jerkily between distinct characters who are only tangentially related, exploring their struggles and their individual grief. We become engaged in one character's story, we begin to feel their anguish...and then we move suddenly to a tangential character and learn about them instead, putting personal anguish both on a pedestal AND in a worldly perspective. This is the balancing act that Barth does so well. It's what Robert Coover only wishes he could do. It is storytelling -- and life-telling -- at its best.

Did you see what I wrote there? The story moves "between distinct characters"! For the first time in recent memory Barth has put aside his broken Ident-a-Kit method of character development and given us...new people. They're not all just him and his wife! In "Preparing for the Storm," Barth gives us a surprisingly modernist tale of three characters who bear NO RELATION to him or his wife!

And what's more, these characters live and breathe. They're full-fleshed, unique, perfectly formed. They fit their stories and their circumstances, and most of them would seem downright ODD on the deck of a sailboat. In 1996 Barth was still capable of inventing a new character...so why did he stop?

In one of his more autobiographical books (forgive me if I forget which one) he said that the reader was probably getting tired of old married couples sailing around the Chesapeake, but that that environment was so much a part of his experience that he felt anything he wrote WITHOUT those elements would be somehow false. I agree that his sailing old couples "ring true," but so do these OTHER characters -- the loners Bowman, Tyler, and the narrator battening the hatches before an oncoming storm, Mme Jacqueline Masson with her missing sunglasses, slacker William Allen Wentworth III about to suffer a mundane but crushing revelation.

That's not to say the "Barth and his wife" characters aren't significant as well, of course. "'Waves' By Amien Richard" -- with its teeth-gritting tension (narrative and otherwise) -- and "Ever After" both succeed (and remain fresh near the end of a Barthathon) because they put "Barth and his wife" into new (and terrible) situations. Those stories -- and the frame-tale as a whole -- are beautiful.

"On With the Story" is an uneven collection that is usually satisfying, and is brilliant when it counts. And Scheherazade is only mentioned twice, which at this stage in the game is like her not being there at all, thank goodness.

In my last review I claimed that Barth's language lacks poetry. I stand by that assertion to a point, in that even at his most poetic he is still appealing to structure, rarely taking a "flight of fancy" or just giving us raw emotion.

But that doesn't mean Barth's words are never beautiful...far from it. As my mea culpa for ever suggesting such a thing, here are the final words from "Stories of Our Lives," which also nicely sum up the feeling of the entire (mostly wonderful) book:

Franco the senior art historian, just now masturbating pensively before the draperied window of his condominium overlooking the university's lacrosse field, where the women's varsity squad is working out. Mimi Adler's subtextual smile and narrative-ontological question. That Canadian quarter, still unretrieved from the campus grass. That balled-up book-page on the Club Med beach, slowly unballing itself now by the force of its own resiliency like a time-lapse movie of a sprouting mushroom, until another breeze catches and rolls it lightly seaward.

Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia, Kurdistan. The doomed Marsh Arabs.

The web of the world.

The Barthathon: "Further Fridays"

Take my advice: NEVER DO A BARTHATHON.

The frustration I'm feeling with John Barth is due not just to "Further Fridays" (1995), but also to the fact that I'm halfway through his next book...and while I could excuse Barth's repetitious obsessions in a retrospective essay collection, I cannot excuse them in a subsequent collection of new fiction.

So let's just say I was annoyed when I read "Further Fridays," but my annoyance was self-tempered ("they're essays, it's a collection of diverse material"). Now my annoyance has been ramped up and confirmed, so my feelings about "Further Fridays" -- and Barth as a whole -- are retroactively amplified.

Alright. Dippy cover aside, many of the "Further Fridays" essays are interesting, and some are outright brilliant. His musings about story structure and writer's craft are the most concise, helpful, and entertaining essays I've ever read about those subjects. Barth's students were lucky to have such an articulate and well-informed teacher.

Many of the themes in these essays are echoed -- sometimes word-for-word -- in his novel "Once Upon a Time," and this made me realize something significant about Barth's work: he is basically ALWAYS writing essays; his novels are all about rigorously explaining situations within the framework of an equally rigorously-explained narrative structure.

This may be a strength -- rarely do his novels deviate from their straight-and-true direction -- but I've suddenly noticed that he has no sense of "poetry." His words are carefully-chosen but they are meant to EXPLAIN, not to evoke an emotional response. Even his actual (dippy) poetry is as planned-out as a haiku, albeit a haiku designed to convey a straightforward idea. Barth knows his words intellectually, but not emotionally.

This is most apparent when he proudly presents us (again and again) with his very own newly-minted pet phrase: "coaxial esemplasy." He uses this phrase so often that it gets its own index entry. After defining it in various round-about ways he finally admits that it's exactly the same concept as "feedback loop," but he considers "coaxial esemplasy" to be a more ELEGANT phrase due to the more "modern" connotation of "coaxial" and the ETYMOLOGY of the word "esemplasy."

But hey, Barth: the phrase SUCKS. You're so intent on the intellectual sense of the individual words that you don't realize that, as a phrase "coaxial esemplasy" is clumsy, forgettable, and impossible to parse. The fact that he's used it in his FICTION as well ("Once Upon a Time") hammers home an essential Barth weakness: he loves to explain, but he doesn't bother putting words into beautiful sentences. Form DOES often trump storytelling in his books, because he falls in love with ugly (but nifty) phrases.

This goes way back to his earlier novels. He'll throw these crazy, awkward phrases at the reader (eg. "What you've done is what you'll do") without stopping to wonder if there isn't a better -- and more elegant -- set of words available. Then he'll use them again. And again. And this comes to the basic problem:

Barth is fallible. He can make bad stylistic choices. I think he does this because he becomes passionate (aka "obsessive") about something, and he doesn't realize that other people don't feel the same way. If you've been reading my Barthathon posts then you know where this is going:

Schehera-freaking-zade. Excuse my crudeness, but Barth has had a twenty-year hard-on for her, and I'm not just being flippant when I say so. She is CONSTANTLY coming up, and you can always tell when he's about to mention her again; his writing heats up, he beats around the bush a bit, he sort of shyly avoids the bait, and then WHAM: there she is, presented as though she were an ACTUAL WRITER (as opposed to what she really was: a minor fictional character who existed mainly so that the stories of OTHER characters could get told). Every time Barth presents her in a list of ACTUAL PEOPLE (eg. "You can see this in the stories of Cervantes, Borges, Scheherazade, Pynchon...") I want to scream, and I do, as I'm screaming now: SHE WASN'T REAL AND SHE WASN'T VERY SIGNIFICANT!

Barth is in many ways a LIMITED AUTHOR. His themes, characters, settings, and concepts revolve around the same small handful of ideas. He knows those ideas inside and out and most of them are deep, honest, and beautiful...but that doesn't change the fact that Barth is inexcusably repetitious. The Scheherazade thing is just a symptom of something more unpleasant.

This isn't a problem if you read a SELECTION of his novels, particularly from different points in his career. And sometimes he DOES reach out beyond these worn-out themes (and when he does he's usually brilliant), and he even manages to explain away his obsessions in a halfway-convince way...for a while.

But whenever I read about an older teacher slipping his increasingly-impotent penis into the cleft of his young ex-student's buttocks while sailing a boat in a storm after a fetishy discussion about Scheherazade but before sending a message in a bottle and then having a marital tiff that turns into a full-blown crisis which ends with the woman "teary-eyed"...

...well, let's just say I'm frustrated.

...

Did I mention that his essays about Borges and goose-art were exceptional?

The Barthathon: "Once Upon a Time"

I feel increasingly stupid about reviewing these Barth books.

I'm reading them for pleasure and also out of a vague obsessive desire. I am not reading them so I can write thoughtful (let alone accurate) reviews. Who cares what I have to say about John Barth's writing? Not even *I* care.

How appropriate that these doubts would come to the surface of my brain just as I've finished "Once Upon a Time" (1994), Barth's largely autobiographical "floating opera." In it he gives us shockingly candid, personal close-ups of his own Ambrose Mensch-ish childhood, his struggles to become a jazz drummer (and arranger), his lame attempts to become a writer, his growth as a teacher, the painful dissolution of his first marriage, and his later years with soulmate, former student, and later wife Shelly (she of the "for Shelly" dedication fame).

You might say "oh no, he writes about that stuff in ALL his books!" You'd be right, but that doesn't mean that "Once Upon a Time" isn't worth reading. In this case, Barth approaches all these anecdotes with a sharper filter; not only are they more-or-less "true" this time around, but they're also told in the context of the novel's biggest theme: vocation.

Yes, it's the story of Barth's "calling," that is, his need to make sure that "the sentences get written." Everything in his autobiography is a preparation for the next step, the next idea, the next book. Obstacles are there to teach him lessons, and the rewards are lessons learned. Through "Once Upon a Time" Barth tells us How He Became a Writer, and all those life experiences we're already familiar with are retold so that they point in that precise direction.

Sound artificial? False? The benefit of hindsight? Definitely, and as usual Barth turns that structural weakness into a strength. During the story, Barth (or Shelly, or his twin sister) reminds us at appropriate times that this vocational tale is still a STORY. One of its major characters, Jay Scribner, plays a part in all of Barth's autobiographical epiphanies...but Jay never existed. He's only in the story because, in Barth's authorial opinion, he HAS to be in order for "the story" to work.

Along with the book's "time" conceit -- he has set it two years in the future, and since it takes longer to write the book than it does to live its climactic events the author gradually catches up to the story -- this balance between autobiography and idealized memory is the very thing that Barth is always doing...but this time it is done explicitly and with an appropriate purpose, or at least a purpose that appeals to me. We learn not just about his life, his environment, and the evolution of his writing, but we also learn the HISTORY of those things, both real and fantastic. We learn how HE really feels, and how HE relates to the world. We learn WHY and HOW.

It is honest, clever, and significant. It's Barth's world as it is, and also as it "should be" if it were novelised (which, here, it is). It is mind-bending in a way that ENHANCES the lessons as opposed to obscuring them.

Well, usually. The hundred page introduction contains far more filler, Shelly-love-note-ing, and structure-building than anybody should expect, and that section is also uncomfortably similar to all those other couple-goes-sailing-into-a-crisis books he's written immediately before this one. And you get awfully tired of Barth's (perhaps unconscious) need to tell us exactly what everybody is drinking, which he started doing around "Sabbatical" and REALLY overdoes here. Plus, Jay Scribner's bebob-talk is tiresome ("dippy," even).

But those are the quibbles of one who has read nothing but John Barth since July. "Once Upon a Time" enriches his earlier books (and it's surprising to learn that he was hopped up on amphetamines when he wrote most of them) and partly excuses his repeated themes. There are also brand-new meditations in here that are a joy to read; Barth's description of his early rhythmic and musical revelations are beautiful and I wish he'd spend more time on them in the future (and perhaps drop the frame-tales and mythic heroes for a bit).

I loved "Once Upon a Time" years ago when I first read it. I love it more now. I think it's one of the most significant of his novels, in an understated sort of way. But please, please, please read it SEPARATE from the rest of his books, as opposed to during a somewhat gruelling Barthathon (and before "Further Fridays" which -- you guessed it -- revisits these themes ONCE AGAIN).

The Barthathon: "The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor"

Ignoring the funhouse of creative-license time-twisting for a moment, "The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor" (1991) is about Simon. He travels several life-voyages (childhood to adulthood, family life, divorce, fatherhood, love, sex) while absently flirting with the barrier between literature and the real world. During a climactic moment he is transported into the past (or the fiction) of Sinbad's seven voyages, where he hopes to find his way home by exchanging journey stories with the famous sailor himself.

That simple synopsis does not make a Barth novel, however. Introduce an elaborate mystery involving pirates, virgins, madness, metaphor, and the plotting between nine or ten members of the Sinbad household. Likewise structure the book as a series of frame-tales, re-tellings, interludes, and unreliable narrators. Wrap it all up in the final hundred pages with dense exposition that is both fascinating and maddening. Throw in lots of sex and agonized interpersonal relationships, and you have the REAL "Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor," which is full of so many hair-pin turns that you'd better pay attention or you'll lose your way.

I "lost it" the first time I read the book, which was only a few years ago. I paid scant attention to parts of the story that seemed tangential and dull near the beginning -- the details of Sinbad's visits, the backstories for Kuzia and Jayda (Sinbad's current and previous householders), all that stuff about names and impersonations and all the different versions of the stories. So when the story ended (and those skimmed details became crucial to the mystery) I had no idea what had happened, and I didn't pay attention to the final, beautiful chapter: the storyteller unraveling, the uncertainty before the end, the sad, the sad love.

I understand it all better this time, but I also better recognize the jarring shifts that the book goes through. The mundanity of Simon's (and our) world is described in a distinctly modernist, style...a style which those in Sinbad's world find unrealistic and boring. They want "realistic" stories about dashing heroes and giant serpents, as in Sinbad's tales. The novel bounces back and forth between modernism and romanticism in the same way that Simon spans the worlds.

And yet these two words are not so far apart. Simon loves both of them, and Barth writes in both styles. Love exists in both worlds, as does hate and cruelty and vengeance. "The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor" is about many things -- it's a mystery, an adventure, a serial love story, a bribe for Death -- but the theme that struck me most was that the "real world" can sound fantastic to romantics, and the "romantic world" can sound boring to modernists. The style is important, but the stories contain the same elements under the skin. Sinbad's seven-several morals apply just as well to us as well as they do to them.

To try to sum up the book this way is a stupid thing, and I apologize. If you plan on reading it yourself -- and I'd put it in a Barth "top five" if forced to make a snap judgement -- give the original Sinbad story a gloss first. You don't NEED to pre-read it -- and the book adapts the voyages nicely in all the appropriate places -- but if you already know the Sinbad story you'll be able to devote attention to what really matters: who said who did what for which potential reason, when.

That sounds sterile, but the book isn't. At least, not entirely. I love Barth's "Ambrose Mensch"-style meditations on childhood, maturation, and resignation most especially, and this novel has all of that in spades.

The usual list of Barth themes in this novel: seawalls, deafness, twins, Scheherazade (yes, she's here too, briefly), water-messages, an ill/insane parent, tidewater loss of virginity, going back to go forward (tell your story to return home), older male's declining sexual potency with young lover, troubled writing trip to Spain, ordinary object becomes almost magical and is subsequently lost, tragic young woman inconsiderately used sexually, Borgest ("zahir"), letters ("baylor, kuzia, yasmin"), female reproductive cycle (especially menstruation), sodomy and a general inserting of fingers into rectums, and multiple names (Simon, Simmon, Somebody, Behler, Baylor, Bey el-Loor...)

The Barthathon: "The Tidewater Tales"

"Sabbatical" was the “twin” of "The Tidewater Tales" (1987). This isn't unusual, since all of Barth’s books have been twinned, but these two were closer than all the others before them. The situations, settings, time-frames, and issues were almost identical. Was that a cop-out? After Barth wrote “Sabbatical” as a sort of post-Letters cost-recoup for his publishers (as he mentioned in “The Friday Book”), did he then say “to hell with it,” throw away his unimpeachable literary integrity, and publish the same old book a second time, greatly expanded?

I thought so at first. Suffering from a certain Barth-fatigue -- I've been reading ONLY his books since July, remember -- I limped through the first hundred pages with an unhealthy skepticism, sustained only by my memory of loving the book the last time I read it (in 1994, my first Barth novel). As Sabbatical was about a couple in crisis, sailing around the Chesapeake bay to resolve the worries of childbirth, adulthood, mortality, story-craft, family, and world affairs…well, “Tidewater Tales” brought us Peter and Katherine. A couple in crisis. Sailing around the Chesapeake. Trying to resolve those exact same worries. Again.

To make matters worse, the couple – typical witty, in-love, sexually open-minded Barth-style adults – discovered installments of a “Sex Education” television play, which they proceeded to read to the reader…and which was, in a word, dippy.

Barth got miffed when a journalist said that the poem in “Sabbatical” was dippy – that is, sort of bad and flakey – to which Barth replied that the poem was written by characters who were not poets, so of COURSE it wasn’t very good. Since “Sex Education” was not written by a well-heeled playwright, it was also bad and flakey...but unlike the "Sabbatical" poem it was also quite long and integral to the "Tidewater Tales" plot. And while “Tidewater Tales” was, among other things, about people striving to hone their writing and storytelling skills, “Sex Education” was SO dippy that it’s bound to annoy many readers, especially if they’ve previously read his short story “Night Sea Journey," of which this is sort of a goofy, poorly-conceived sequel.

But there’s a funny thing about Barth: his best books tend to contain annoying elements...which are later consciously redeemed. As you approach the end of the book you realize that the bad stuff is – as Barth’s characters would put it – dramaturgically required. In the same way that a character must be bad before she can ultimately achieve redemption, so do the Barthian elements need to be bad before they can become good.

And when they’re good…oh, man.

You see, “Tidewater Tales” reached a point – after all the C.I.A. dribble and family conflicts and dippy stories – when the tone CHANGED. Things began to come together and reveal themselves as far more complex and rich than I'd ever imagined. Tangential issues became prominent and – most amazingly – INEVITABLE.

When all the characters finally anchored behind ordinary point, amidst the warm summer night parties of hundreds of other boats, and when they all gathered together for the first time after having revealed their histories and problems and personal quirks during the preceeding bulk of the book…the story revved up. The clouds gathered. The final, long stretches of storytelling -- punctuated by the sudden and tragic storms of grief, anger, loss, anguish, yearning -- brought everything and everybody together, and IT WORKED. I celebrated with the fictional characters. The book was redeemed, its several points exquisitely made, the end.

And yes, I cried at the conclusion of “Sex Education,” I admit it. And I’ll also say, as part of this “redemption” theme, that there are very good (“dramaturgically relevant”) reasons why “Sabbatical” was so similar to “Tidewater Tales.” They are linked in a way that is nothing short of brilliant. Long live Barth, and his characters, and his tales!

Having said that, however, I have a personal message for Mr. Barth himself: lay off Sheherazade, will you? I understand that you have an outright obsession with the character – and that’s fine – but have you ever noticed that OTHER PEOPLE don’t share your enthusiasm? It’s one thing for one or two of your characters to reveal themselves as long-time fans of "1001 Arabian Nights," but when EVERY literate character in "The Tidewater Tales" turned out to gushingly consider her to be the end-all be-all of literary creation, your enthusiasm went beyond “barely-in-control” and into “outright masturbation.” When I realized that I’d have to sit through a 20-page analysis of her menstrual cycle (as ALREADY explored by you in “The Friday Book”), I decided it was time for you to enter Sheherazade detox.

So stop it. Please. I have more of your books to get through and I don't want to deal with Sheherazade again.

“The Tidewater Tales” did inspire me, once upon a time, to read “The Odyssey,” “Don Quixote,” and the first half of “1001 Arabian Nights." You don’t need to read them before tackling this particular book – because unlike “Chimera,” Barth gives an excellent gloss here for those uninitiated – but the characters of Ted, Diana, Donald Quicksoat and – errr – Sheherazade are much richer if you’ve read their respective books.

And that recurring theme about "the key to the treasure is the treasure?" I suspect this is something that Barth reinterprets from time to time, because now it's specifically about WORDS: Stories often feature magic words, which are the keys to fabulous treasures; but the treasures, as represented in fiction, are also words themselves ("a mountain of jewels," for instance), so the key (magic words) to the treasure is also the treasure itself. So there.

If you can explain his new mantra to me ("what you've done is what you'll do"), I'll give you a cookie.

The traditional list of traditional John Barth themes (not including those necessarily pulled over from the plot of "Sabbatical"): anthropomorphized egg and sperm, water messages, keys, Bloodsworth Island, Huckleberry Finn, "once upon a time \ there was a story that began...", the war of 1812, the myth of the wandering hero, 1001 Arabian Nights, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, twins (both babies and doppelgangers), impotence, and leeway in categorization.

Ruth Miller, Sweet-Smelling Scheherazade

I'll have more to say about Scheherazade in a day or two -- once I've finished "Tidewater Tales" -- but for now here's a modern-day, totally sniffable incarnation: Ruth Miller, writing a nested frame-tale for Odorono Deodorant in the May 12, 1928 New Yorker:

Women constantly ask me how they can be free from the danger of underarm odor and ruinous stains on dresses.

I can answer no better than by telling what women who use Odorono regularly tell me.

"My doctor told me about Odorono first years ago; it's marvelous, I use it all the time."

Another, "One day my dress shield slipped and I ruined a new dress. A friend told me about Odorono and now I don't bother with anything else. I use it often enough to keep the underarm dry all the time."

A business woman says, "Perspiration odor turns men in an office against a woman quicker than anything else and Odorono is the only way I know to keep dainty through the strain of a long busy office day!"

"It makes me feel so much more exquisite, and self-confident," says one woman. "I use Odorono twice a week and never have a particle of moisture under the arm."

Four better tales have never been told! I bet Ruth Miller kept her husband awake every night, telling him stories about smelly women in office buildings, always breaking off at dawn before he got a good whiff of her armpits. Notice that there are THREE levels of story here: Ruth Miller says that a lady told her that her friend/doctor told her... She finishes by saying that "women of breeding" use over four million bottles of Odorono.

Before you ask who Ruth Miller was, I have no idea. I guess shilling for a deodorant company didn't bring lasting fame.

The Barthathon: "The Friday Book"

My first problem is that I'm not a huge fan of essay collections. I'm not much interested in theory, so long essays about postmodernism versus modernism are going to leave me pretty cold. Even when they AREN'T desperate and wanky.

My second problem is that I'm not a huge fan of "The Thousand and One Nights." I read the first volume in preparation for tackling "The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor" a few years ago, and I found the stories to be repetitive and colourless: cardboard characters, rudimentary motivation, and every woman described as somehow rivaling the moon in beauty...which is sort of hard to picture. I have no doubt, however, that my two fat "Penguin" volumes were heavily edited. Maybe I missed something.

Since I don't share Barth's love of (or rather, somewhat creepy obsession about) Scheherazade, I'm not absorbed by speculation about her menstrual cycle. Since I'm not very concerned with Barth's definition of "postmodernism," I'm not absorbed by his essays and lectures about the subject. In short, though it contains many wonderful insights, I wasn't awed by "The Friday Book" (1984) in general.

My basic stumbling block was the constant repetition of Barth's personal interests. These pieces were written and performed for diverse audiences, and therefore they tended to come back to the same themes and plunder each other (right down to individual quotations and the same set of phrases) without fear of being boring. This is to be expected, but it's obnoxious when you know what's coming next..."ah, it's that Khakheperesenb quote again." His quips and quotes were apt and brilliant the first time, but they get old the second time around.

Also (to continue my issues with the basic structure of the book) I got tired of his oft-repeated reference points: Virgil, Homer, Kafka, Borges, Gass, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges, Hawkes, Gardner, Marquez, Cervantes, Flaubert, Chaucer, Dickens, Borges, and Borges. These are important figures, and Barth obviously thinks about them an awful lot, but after a while his ruminations got tiresome.

In short: do not sit down and just read "The Friday Book" from cover-to-cover, especially not during a single week, with the almost Barthian desire to actually FINISH it on Friday. Which I did, because I'm on a mission.

If you pick and choose essays, however, I think you'll enjoy the book an awful lot. Barth has a unique, intelligent, and witty insight into the literature that he reads, teaches, and writes. His comparison of crab-art with historical novels is fascinating, and his many comments about "Chimera" have made me want to go back and re-read it...there's obviously more to that book than I'd thought.

He also has a strikingly individualistic approach to society, politics, and art; far from a knee-jerk leftist or reactionary, he seems to have charted his own path (much the way the heroes in his fiction do). Instead of either deriding or triumphing any particular point of view, he explains how the viewpoints work, how they don't work, and then he suggests methods of their improvement. I particularly like his comments about innocence:

One should be no great admirer of innocence, in either narratives, individuals, or cultures. Where it's genuine, after a certain age it's unbecoming, off-putting, even freakish and dangerous. Where it's false, it's false. To admire it much is patronizing and sentimental; to aspire to it is self-defeating. Let us admire--in cultures, narratives, and people--not innocence, but experience and grace.

I bet he was a great professor.

Another of Barth's virtues is his ability to clarify his points after the fact, and to admit when he's changed his point of view. Since these essays were written over a twenty-year period, it's unsurprising that he'd change his mind about a few things. Barth DOES have experience and grace, and both traits come through in this rich (but clunky) book. Skim it, carefully read the selections that interest you, and then go and explore those amazing authors he so desperately loves.

All the traditional Barth themes are here, and expounded upon, and repeated, and then analyzed...multiple times. His autobiographical memories of twinhood -- he was named "Jack" and his twin sister was "Jill" -- shed light on a number of his literary obsessions and foreshadow (if I remember correctly) parts of "On With the Story." He also exploits a theme that was only first explicitly mentioned in "Sabbatical," that is, the occasional need to go back in order to go forward.

The Barthathon: "Sabbatical"

Having passed the axis mundi and entered the second half of his literary output (so far), John Barth puts aside his "love it or lump it" style of conceptual fiction and eases us into "Sabbatical's" (1982) gentle estuaries.

Subtitled "A Romance," it is certainly that. This is the first time that Barth focuses on mundane human problems, midlife crises, and ennui, as opposed to unusual or historically-significant plot complications. In less skillful hands these topics could be dull, but BARTH KNOWS PEOPLE, at least certain TYPES of people. He deeply understands the angst of his characters, and "Sabbatical" is, at its heart, a dialog of angst.

Fenwick and Susan are married. They've embarked on an extended sailing trip to try to come to terms with their problems, and to make some crucial decisions about their future. At the beginning we're unsure of what their problems actually are, and their marriage seems pretty much perfect...but as the book's OTHER subtitle promises us ("A wry, mysterious tale about love, the sea, and storytelling") there is much going on below the surface, and I'm not just talking about Chessie.

The C.I.A. is involved. Relatives have disappeared mysteriously. Fenwick and Susan find themselves on an impossibly uncharted island, where Fenn loses his beloved boina and gets fired upon. Susan's family is a strange mess of authors, revolutionaries, and subnormal children, and Fenwick worries that the government may have designs on his heart. Huge, beautifully-described storms at sea bracket the equally awesome emotional blowouts on the boat, which crash towards a conclusion that SHOULDN'T have a happy ending...

...but does. I can't tell you about Fenwick's final revelation, but I WILL say that it's one of the most satisfying and surprising resolutions I've ever come across. It's the sort of "click" that should have come at the end of "Giles Goat-Boy." It's perfect and makes some of the more annoying elements of the book worthwhile.

Because, yes, "Sabbatical" is about "storytelling," so it is actually the story that Fenwick and Susan have written about their own adventure. You get the co-authors squabbling within the text itself. You get footnotes that are supposed to help introduce characters (but instead are just misplaced and confusing). You get the usual Barth practice of each character having multiple nicknames, and the need to describe in great detail how each name came about. You also get the intelligent, cute, sexually explicit and pun-filled "man and wife" dialog that we first read in "Chimera" and which finds its full expression here.

Also, for the first time, Barth REALLY lets loose with the sailing. Todd Andrews had an extended bit of sailing at the end of "LETTERS," but here we get an anatomical description of boats, procedures, and Maryland geography. I personally don't know the first thing about boats...in fact, the only boating information I've ever read has come from books by John Barth. But even so, he describes everything with such vivid joy that you can't help but appreciate the journey, even if you don't know what it means to "roller-furl" a "genoa."

This is Barth's most concise and beautiful book. I've never read it before and it's been a real delight, especially during the last fifty pages when things began to gel. If I were to recommend an introductory John Barth novel to a curious reader, this would be the one. Hint hint!

Barthy themes we read in "Sabbatical" for the first time: "on with the story" and references to Cervantes. Themes that continue from "LETTERS": Francis Scott Key, Edgar Allen Poe, the C.I.A., characters who have been somehow involved in literary history, and "Barataria." Themes that we've been coming across for a long time: water-messages, sea-nettles, twins, impotency, night-sea-journeys, the heroic pattern, Scheherazade, personified eggs and sperm.

The John Barth Sailing Game!

Next time you're reading a John Barth novel, play "The John Barth Sailing Game!" Or, next time you're playing "The John Barth Sailing Game," why not go for a final sail up the Chesapeake? And next time you're sailing up the Chesapeake, why not read a novel by John Barth?

On with the game!

• Every time you see a loblolly pine, keep sailing until you see the next loblolly pine.
  
• If a character has multiple names that are used interchangeably, attempt to drown yourself with insufficient ballast.
• Is there a "Baratarian" in the book? Shiver within your foul-weather gear.
• If Edgar Allan Poe or Miguel de Cervantes are referenced, go back and brush up on your classics, otherwise you'll get lost.
  
• Sail quietly past any plotlines involving the C.I.A.
  
• When a pair of intelligent, literate, married adults enjoy a pun-filled confessional dialogue that is liberally sprinkled with explicit sex-talk, stop the boat and wash your hands.
• When somebody goes sailing, sail on! Once upon a time / there was a boat trip that began / once upon a time...
• Impotency? Twins? Thank your lucky stars.
• Be simultaneously chivalrous and enlightened when Scheherazade drops by.
  
• A character subverts the illusion of dialog by ending the reiteration of a previously-described idea with "et cetera"? Skip an estuary!
• Hey, is that a message in a bottle off to starboard? You'd better stop, read it, and then LIVE it.
• Don't eat the Maryland Beaten Biscuits.
• If a sperm or an egg is anthropomorphized, decide whether you should head upstream or downstream. Then decide which fork to take.
  
• Proceed directly to Fort McHenry whenever Francis Scott Key is mentioned.
  
• Proceed directly to Key Island whenever Fort McHenry et cetera.
• Keep your eyes peeled during the Night Sea Journey.
  
• Is the key to the treasure actually the treasure? Have some adventures and find out!
  

If you decide to turn this into a drinking game, I take no responsibility for your pathetic drunkenness.

The Barthathon: "LETTERS"

Did you notice? The Barthathon has expanded to include "The Friday Book" and "Where Three Roads Meet." Once "Further Fridays" arrives, they'll be one impenetrable (and complete) happy family!

Okay. "LETTERS."

Where do I begin?

Somewhere in this massive book, one of the Barth-surrogate characters (Ambrose Mensch AKA "Arthur Morton King") ponders people who love and enjoy life. Then he ponders people who enjoy writing about life, and people who love the WORDS they write with, and then -- finally -- the people who are absolutely, painfully, totally in love with the structure BEHIND the words, the writing, the "LETTERS" (1979).

This novel marks the high-point of Barth's letter-love, his massive statement about structure, formalism, words, meanings. His later books also explore these themes, but always in a much more gentle way, as though the author were gently prodding the reader through the story's funhouse. In this book (and "Chimera" (1972), its predecessor and soulmate), the author just kicks you roughly through the funhouse doors, switches off the lights, and leaves you to your own fumbling incomprehension.

Unlike "Chimera," however, "LETTERS" is massive. It took me two weeks to read it but I feel like I've been lost in it for years. Now that I've stumbled out the other end, I think I can say a few words about what it is and how it works, but NO review could even GLOSS the details, so I won't even try. This will be a confused review, because "LETTERS" is a confused book.

This novel is much maligned (as Barth himself says in the foreword), described as notoriously "unreadable." I disagree; "LETTERS" is AT TIMES difficult to read, but it has enough mystery and beauty to keep a competent (and not-too-jaded) reader going.

First off, a word about the structure: "LETTERS" is Barth's seventh novel, with a title of seven words, consisting of seven months of letters written by (and for) seven different different characters, each of whom writes on a particular day of the week...you know there are seven of those, right? And you also know what you're in for.

Five of the letter-writers are characters from his first six novels, now in the "second half" of their lives (ala the heroes in "Chimera"). The sixth character is "The Author," who solicits the other characters for permission to use their subsequent lives as part of an upcoming book (guess which one). In addition, he plans to combine the properties of all of their plots and themes into this book...which he certainly does, creating a mish-mash of styles that only Barth could try to hold together.

These are not throw-away characters, invented just to serve a wanky point; each is fully realized and is given enough "letter-time" to establish a book's-worth of plot. Writing on Fridays, Todd Andrews (the once-suicidal lawyer from "The Floating Opera") is elderly, sweet, and increasingly obsessed with what appears to be a repetition of his first story...he causes himself no end of grief (Bellerophon-style) trying to fit current events into a nebulous pattern that doesn't QUITE work. With him, we receive the themes of repetition, sailing, and old age. He also gives us "the tragic view of history."

Jacob Horner (anti-hero of "The End of the Road") is the Thursday writer. He has, since the tragic death of his mistress, become increasingly immobile. He spends his days in a southern Ontario "remobilization farm," soon joined by his dead mistress' tripped-out husband, who wants to "resurrect" the dead by reenacting the past. Horner's thematic contribution is "the anniversary view of history," an obsession with dates that is annoying at the beginning of the book and EXTREMELY annoying by the end (when EVERYBODY'S doing it). The writers tend to digress into half-page lists of date-specific birthdays, deaths, and events, none of which are related to the plot (and when they are, they aren't important).

This sort of device would have been awe-inspiring in the pre-Wikipedia days, but now we can get that information with a simple search query. If anything has aged poorly in "LETTERS," it's this obsession with dates...but since each letter IS written on a specific date, and since the plots DO hinge on anniversaries, the technique is an important one...just underwhelming nowadays.

Wednesday's authors are a selection of ancestral Burlingames and Cooks (from "The Sot-Weed Factor"), who alternate their surnames -- and their potency -- with each generation. The Cook letters take up the bulk of the novel, and they are of such dense historical material that you need a machete and a bottle of Tylenol to get through them. The Cooks have two main goals: bringing about a "second revolution" (vaguely associated with restoring the rights of slaves and Native Indians), and either thwarting the aims of their fathers (in the first half of their lives) or advancing those same aims (when they realize that the aims were not what they seemed...maybe).

The various Cooks tell us mainly about the war of 1812, and subsequent attempts to rescue Napoleon. Each family member has become deeply involved in both subverting and advancing historical events in North America...but their efforts cancel each other out so often (and tend to produce such negligable and unverifiable results) that none of them ever seem to ACHIEVE anything...and this is MADDENING. It's one thing to read fifty-page chunks of tangled historical conniving as long as there is a CONCLUSION, but all the Cooks can say in the end is "eh, maybe it worked, I dunno, but I'll keep trying."

The Cooks bring us "the tragic view of history," revolution, political intrigue, and multiple viewpoints. They also bring the OVERRIDING theme of multiple identities and disguises...and this, coupled with the endless historical data, FRUSTRATED ME.

You've got Andrew Cook VI, who may also be André Castine, or Monsieur Casteene (one of whom may also be "Lord Baltimore.") You've also got extremely complicated love septagons consisting of people who have multiple names; Jeannine Mack is "Bea Golden," "Bibi," "Peggy Rankin," and "Regina de Nominatrix." Marsha Blank is "Pocahontas" and other people that I forget. Merope Bernstein is "Rennie Morgan" and "Margana y Fael." Add to this a bunch of maiden names and you'll understand why the characters tend to blur together.

Anyway, Jerome Bray writes on Fridays. A descendent of Harold Bray (false Grand Tutor of "Giles Goat-Boy"), Bray is even more disturbing than his ancestor. He's building a biomechanical novel-writing machine called "LILYVAC II," meanwhile "seeding" the novel's seven primary females. Bray, with his half-revealed motivations and impossible history is John Barth's first and only foray into outright horror, and it's a shock to read such perverse and awful sidetracks in his fiction. Naturally, I wish he'd given Bray a bit more time.

LILYVAC II is being programmed to write a revolutionary novel, and it is apparently writing Bray's letters as well. If you've read "Chimera," you'll finally understand those disconnected bottled-messages that Bellerophon received, full of ominous accusations and RESETs. They come directly from "LETTERS"...which was published seven years AFTER "Chimera."

This is because Monday's writer is Ambrose Mensch, protagonist (and "author") of the more readable stories in "Lost in the Funhouse." Ambrose is the obsessive structuralist side of John Barth, who helps Barth himself (Sunday's letter-writer) develop the crazy, nit-picky, mathematical backbone of..."Chimera." This is possible because "LETTERS" is set in 1969. Even though "Chimera" came out in 1972, the plot of "LETTERS" occurs before "Chimera" was released. If you think that's confusing, try dealing with Mensch's thematic contribution: mathematics, spirals, the alphabet, writing, and letters themselves...it's Mensch who is so hung up on those bottled "water messages" that are such a Barth staple.

Here's a particularly fun brain-teaser bonus: Mensch is writing the screenplay for a film adaptatio of all of John Barth's novels. The director (Reg Prinz) starts by filming recreations of familiar scenes from Barth's books, but soon becomes totally focussed on the war of 1812. Lady Amherst (Saturday's author and the only new primary character) is confused, because none of Barth's books have ever DEALT with the war of 1812.

Are you with me here? "LETTERS" IS about the war of 1812, so it makes perfect sense for Prinz to focus on it. But the film is adapting material from the book that the film is in. This would make no sense to characters who are actually in the book (like Lady Amherst), but to the rest of us, fortunately outside the hell that is "LETTERS," this gradual revelation is simultaneously wonderful and sort of nauseating.

It is that sort of book. Cryptic computer print-outs. The struggle between film and pen. The sources of inspiration. The structure of the story. Each month's letters read in "author order" instead of "by date" (because of the tilted-calendar formula, which must be seen to be believed).

What else is there, though? I'll tell you what: deep, archetypal characters struggling to get through life, discover themselves, and understand the crazy world around them. The Mensch/Amherst plot is a gorgeous and bittersweet family drama which expands upon the tantalizing details of "Lost in the Funhouse." There are ACTUAL STORIES in here, and you can CARE about them.

Most significant and heart-rending, however, is the tale of Todd Andrews, the solitary lawyer who sets out on his last sailing trip, saying goodbye to the land and the people that he loves. Andrews is the book's stand-out character. His letters should have been the last ones, but the "calendar" structure would not have allowed it. "Ambrose Mensch" trumps "John Barth" again.

I liked "LETTERS." I think I "understood" a bit chunk of it, but if any book needed a companion volume (especially one that outlines events in chronological order), this is one. I think it suffers a bit too much digression, and the Cook sections are horribly tedious, but somehow it all fits together, and somehow it's wonderful.

And no, you don't need to read his first six novels before reading this one, just in case you're looking for an autumn hobby.

Rather than list the Barth themes in "LETTERS," you'd do better to say which ones AREN'T here: none. But it does introduce the first really anatomical description of Maryland sailing, and I suspect that some of these events are echoed in the much maligned "Coming Soon!!!", a review of which is...coming soon.

Life at the Moment

A quick catch-up:

• Avidly reading John Barth's "LETTERS," trying always to find the most comfortable spot to read it in: porch, balcony, couch, chair, bed, coffee shop, park.
• Meanwhile proofreading a friend's satirical self-help book.
• Also reading a book on composing white papers, since I need to produce one at work.
• And promising, at some point, to read the graphic novels that Ash loaned me last week.
• Editing down certain songs ("Pretend to be Nice," "Terrible Thought," "Heart be Still") for this Thursday's open drag night, and making scattershot plans for the night itself.
• Watching the rain, the wind, and the gradual cooling of each day.
• Tending my hand, which has gotten worse due to all this activity. Acting upon the realization that POSTURE has a lot to do with the pain, and alternating cold-and-hot soaking seems to help it.
• Getting back, eventually, to working on UPhold's "Road to Avondale" project, and writing on Octavia-the-Neo (once my hand has improved and I start reading a lighter book), and taking the next BusWalk Tour.
• Watching the second season of "Twin Peaks" and enjoying it.
• Praying that I don't need to walk in the rain until I can buy new boots on the weekend.
• Pimping for my neighbour's dog. Waiting for the right time to approach the resident squirrels.
• Saving money with a vague hope of buying a car next spring.
• Anticipating next month's Pridetoberfest, BBGG DJ gig, hallowe'en, birthday, and "Mother Mother" live show.
  
• Jus' relaxin'.
  

John Barth in My City

I am deep in the thick of John Barth's "LETTERS," a novel that requires every inch of attention in order to digest. I am completely drawn into its elaborate conceits and the extraordinarily vivid world of its characters...almost TOO vivid. It is, after all, about the delicate line between fiction and reality, inspiration and fabrication. I constantly need to ask myself (much as the characters do): did this really happen? Is this a real place?

Presumably because it's (partially) related to the war of 1812, southern Ontario figures frequently in the book (in particular Ottawa, Niagara Falls, and Toronto), but usually in a sketchy way which implies that Barth didn't really visit during his research. When, on page 200, Lady Amherst writes about travelling to Stratford for the Shakespeare Festival, I got a creeping sensation...this book is getting awfully close to my stomping grounds. My mother and I were in Stratford just three weeks ago.

Then, suddenly:

...I was handed a sealed envelope with my name on it by one of the ushers. I was obliged to sit before I could open it. The note inside, in a handwriting I knew, read: "My darling: Dinner 8 P.M., Wolpert Hotel, Kitchener."

Yes, I LIVE in that city which Barth describes as "in the middle of nowhere." What's more, the "very European old hotel" is no doubt the WALPER Hotel, built in 1893 after a fire destroyed the original 1820's structure. The Walper is a grand old landmark where drag queens such as yours truly have, at various times, performed in "the improbably elegant German dining room on the second floor."

Given the way the book is going, I'm waiting to come across the character of Muffy St. Bernard IV, bastard offspring of Napoleon and Mary Shelley.

The Barthathon: "Giles Goat-Boy"

The first time I read John Barth's "Giles Goat-Boy" (1966) I was totally baffled. It seemed like a giant mess of confusing, cyclic plots and satirical references, spelling out a grand and almost transcendent philosophy that I was just too stupid to grasp. The second time -- a few years ago -- I was impatient to "get the point," and I skimmed the dull parts in order to achieve that elusive transcendence. I failed again...but was even MORE intrigued. All of Barth's other books were digestible, after all...why should this one be any different? And if the theme was so complex as to be almost impossible to understand, it must be a REAL piece of wisdom!

Now that I've read the book for the third time -- and very carefully too -- I can say with authority that there's a very good reason why I never understood its philosophical point before: the book is way too long, way too complicated, terribly organized, and an almost complete failure in so many ways. To use one of its own terms -- which makes me a little nauseous to see one more time -- "Giles Goat-Boy" is flunkéd.

I warn you now that I'm going to give it all away. The book's central (hidden, poorly realized) theme is that of paradoxical opposites living together in sort-of-harmony, and the paradox of "Giles Goat-Boy" is that the IDEAS are interesting, but they are too complicated to be interesting to read. So I'll spell them out here (as best as I think I understand them), to at least save you the 800 pages of the book itself.

Oh, the superficial ideas are clever. They're BRILLIANT, in fact. "Giles Goat-Boy" is presented as a computer-generated biographical reconstruction, given to a professor/author whose initials happen to be "J.B.," and then published by a reluctant publishing company. Already we have the traditional Barthian conceit of an unreliable manuscript, pieced together from multiple sources, handed down through a long line of anonymous people, and ending with a suspicious final chapter which may or may not be fraudulent.

So "Giles Goat-Boy" is a sort of New Testament (actually subtitled "The Revised New Syllabus") which tells the story of a hero-to-be, a goat-boy whose life fits the pattern of mythical heroes and prophets...yes, it's that "heroic pattern" that John Barth later explores in "Chimera."

Like Bellerophon from "Chimera," the goat-boy (George) is convinced that he is a prophet, and he tries his best to fit the archetype of the hero/prophet. Also like Bellerophon, this goes poorly, because George himself is no heroic stereotype; he's a flawed human who was raised as a goat, he is just as confused and uncertain as the people around him, and his attempts to "fit the pattern" go horribly awry: how can a REAL person ever fit into an IDEAL?

Besides the "heroic pattern" element, this book's other conceit is that George lives in a world based around a "University" idiom. The countries are all "colleges," the prophets are "tutors," the newspaper reporters are "journalism majors," the wars are "riots." Written in 1966, the major conflict -- the "Quiet Riot" -- is between New Tammany College (America) and the Nikolayan College (the "Student Unionist" USSR). George -- self-styled "Grand Tutor" -- wants to end the Quiet Riot by disarming the technological/war/political machine embodied by a computer called "WESCAC" (and the Nikolayan "EASCAC" counterpart). Then he wants to lead everybody to "Commencement Gate" (enlightenment) by showing them how to "pass" (an uncertain term, sort of "do the correct thing" or "live properly").

The people that he meets -- and tries to "pass" -- are all representations of human ideas and stereotypes: Max, his mentor, a disaffected Jewish ex-Student Unionist obsessed with his own unworthiness; Leonid, a Nikolayan spy who so desires to be selfless that he is potentially selfish; Croaker, a Frumentian (African) savage who is essentially "the body" to Dr. Eirkopf's withered and emotionless "mind"; Stoker, the crass, tempting, and misleading "dean o' flunks" (devil); Peter Greene, the necessarily blind embodiment of all American vice and virtue; Ira Hector, the selfish industrialist; Chancellor Rexford, the man who leads the "campus" with charisma but accomplishes nothing; Dr. Sear, the jaded upper-class professional; and Anastasia...errr, sort of a compendium of female traits, I suppose.

George tries to tutor these people while fending off the threat of Jerome Bray -- a mysterious, inhuman, and truly disturbing co-claimant to Grand Tutorhood -- and carrying out a set of cryptic but typically heroic tasks assigned to him by WESCAC.

The first four hundred pages of the book are LOTS of fun. You get an excellent gloss of world conflict, relgion, and sociology as satirized within the "University" idiom. As an added bonus you also get a lesson in heroic tragedy with "The Tragedy of Taliped Decanus," a hilarious seventy page retelling of "Oedipus Rex" (in rhyming heroic couplets and '60s slang).

Then, having gone through his preliminary obstacles, George begins to tutor. He believes that, to pass, everybody must learn to create firm categories and distinctions: passing is different from failing, good is different from bad, east is different from west, selfishness is different from selflessness, etc. He discusses this idea with each of the people mentioned above, and solves all of his tasks using this method: boundaries must be moved apart, people must remain unyielding in their principles. He is 100% convinced that this is the correct way to "pass"...but he has some tiny doubts now and then that he can't nail down.

We read hundreds of pages of philosophical debate. George debates everybody. He discusses all the ramifications of his theory. He manages to convince everybody (and the reader) that rigid categorization is the way to "pass"...

...and then his solutions fail. Things get worse. His "tutees" are more flunkéd than ever. Barth is, I suppose, criticizing dogmatism.

After an extended period of moping, George realizes that he was wrong: people must FORSAKE all categories: boundaries must CEASE to exist, people must accept ALL principles. Passing IS failing, and vice versa! For another hundred pages he tutors all of the above people again, teaching them this new way to "pass"...despite his tiny doubts. And once again, while sitting through these seemingly endless debates, the reader is convinced that George has finally got it figured out...

...and then his solutions fail. Things get even WORSE. George winds up getting lynched, with a goathorn stuck up his butt, the fate (Barth is telling us) of those who see EVERYTHING in shades of gray, refusing to recognize extremes.

After an extended period of moping, George realizes that he was wrong once again: people must...errr, he knows EXACTLY what they must do! For a third time he tutors everybody, but gives them contradictory advice that doesn't seem to have a purpose.He still has lots of doubts, but those doubts no longer bother him. He engages in a series of very '60s sex/conception/womb moments with Anastasia, briefly short-circuits WESCAC, and finally drives the nightmarish Jerome Bray off campus (maybe).

And what is George's grand philosophy, the one you've read 800 pages to learn? Oh jeez, you better have read close, because Barth does a piss-poor job of explaining it. The best I can understand, George has realized that the world is full of necessary contradictions and paradoxes; fighting against paradoxes is failure, but bringing yourself close enough to the paradoxes so that you can see them clearly -- and yet accept them as unsolvable or irrelevant -- is the only way to pass...which is simultaneously failure, but that's just one of life's paradoxes, that nobody really passes or fails, because we're full of contradictions, and so is the world, etc.

As you can imagine, this is NOT the resolution of a self-help book. The thing is, when you're reading "Giles Goat-Boy," you are anticipating SOME sort of return, but what you get is a concept so complicated, recursive, and difficult to live with that not even the AUTHOR can explain it properly. Since George (and Barth) seem to believe that the concept is impossible to really grasp...well, he literally seems to give up trying. The book falls flat on its face.

Infuriating. Fatally flawed. Passéd and flunkéd...but maybe THAT is the point? ARGH!

Anyway, I'm so exhausted by this book that I can't talk about it anymore, but since this is "The Barthathon," how does it fit into his body of work? This is the first time he really tries (and fails) to understand male-female relationships. The heroic pattern is also explored for the first time (intentionally at least). You've also got twins, agonized impotence, and Zeno's paradoxes (which will come up again in "On With the Story," I believe). Nobody goes to Maryland or sails a ship, and in many ways this is the most "un-Barth" of all the Barth novels, but "Chimera" later gives us both a mythology-distilling computer and "Jerome Bray" (J.B. again?)