BOOKS
321
There is no stylistic extravagance in this fiction, no enthusiasm; the
rhetoric is the rhetoric of argument, of disputation. Without being
showily philosophical, the novels
were
philosophical. A nihilist
comedy, so Barth has described them, and a nihilist tragedy.
Then came the
tour de force,
a long novel written in the mode of
Defoe and Smollett,
The Sot-Weed Factor
(1960), in which Barth easily
and humorously demonstrated his virtuosity as a novelist. Not only
does
The Sot- Weed Factor
crackle with the energy of pure narration,
good storytelling, but it is as well recondite, urbane, and it comes
round at last with a fair interpretation of American history, if not of
historical writing itself. What follows is still a grand conundrum, the
symbolical allegory,
Giles Goat-Boy,
which no doubt sits now beside
William Gaddis's
The Recognitions
on that shelf reserved for long
books too smart for their own good, too smart and too scarce in
pleasure.
Giles Goat-Boy
led Barth directly into the metafictional
mode that flourished in the seventies, and he became, as soon as the
term was invented, an exemplary post-modernist.
Lost in the Funhouse
and
Chimera
are collections of related short pieces and retold tales,
irascibly written. Some of the stories in
Lost in the Funhouse
are
superb: "Night-Sea Journey," "Petition," and Barth's retelling of
A
Thousand and One Nights
in
Chimera
transcends the self-conscious
narration.
I briefly rehearse Barth's career because all these fictions, these
different styles and modes, are united in
Letters,
Barth's latest novel.
Where have I been? What am I doing? These are the questions that
dominate this immense, boring, learned, precious novel. The key to the
treasure, Barth has cleverly written, is of course the treasure. For all of
Barth's contrary protes tation,
Letters
is a
roman
a
clef,
and the
clef
is
heavy, the
oeuvre
itself, and no treasure at all. The novel simply does
not stand on its own two feet.
It
is written to Barth from Barth (one
thinks of the economy of
Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes), and it is
written for the adept, for the cryptographer. There are the letters of the
alphabet and there are the letters we send to each other, messages, and
in the cross play of this double reference Barth establishes the govern–
ing frame of his fiction . The acrostical letters of the first kind are the
ones that matter in
Letters,
not those of the second kind. Barth writes
letters to all his major characters, and they write back. The best
respondent is Jacob Horner. The others do not command attention.
The dullest of the letter writers is the newest, Germaine Amherst, born
in this book, a garrulous latter-day Mrs. Montague whose existence is
purel y formal.
