Word: barth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Letters, By John Barth. (Putnam, $16.95): John Barth's endless epistolary novel takes five of the author's old characters and one new one and sets them to writing letters, usually not to each other but to dead people, themselves, imaginary characters, or the author. The letters go on forever through 700 pages, and though Barth's details follow an intricately laid-out pattern, there seems to be very little point to it all. Barth's writing remains contortedly witty, and alone gives Letters some value, but Barth might have shown some regard or consideration for his readers and restrained...
...Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts by Eberhard Busch (Fortress, 1976). A colleague's intimate biography of the courageous polymath who was this century's leading Protestant theologian...
FICTION: Cannibals and Missionaries. Mary McCarthy∙Endless Love, Scott Spencer ∙Letters, John Barth∙ McKay's Bees, Thomas McMahon∙Sophie's Choice, William Styron∙The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth ∙The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald...
...LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls it "an epidemic rage for reenactment." Andrews draws up a detailed schedule of the events that led up to his first decision to commit suicide, and realizes he's reliving it all, and heading in the same direction. Each generation in the exhaustive family history of the Cook/Burlingame clan spends the first...
...Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort of literary autism. That's it--the burden of the past: not a roster of great literary forebears but the author's own bibliography. Barth is getting older, and he hasn't found his Theme. Letters is his middle-age-crisis objectified into a monstrosity. No one can fault Barth...