Word: barth
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CHIMERA is not Barth's best book. It is not really even close. But it is serious experimentation of a high order and its failure works in ways more interesting than mere success...
Only just recently has perspective brought some recognizable shape into the fictional chaos of the last fifteen years and as the dust finally settles. John Barth is found at center stage. At each recent development in experimental fiction. Barth has consistently been on hand. His career is a case in point for a whole generation of American writers and as he and his colleagues try to write themselves into the seventies a brief glance back may be in order...
...John Barth came of novelistic age in the fifties when existentialism was all the rage, and the grand American theme was embattled innocence in the rye and on the road. His first two novels. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) are cast in the spirit of those times conventional in form ironic in tone, and much preoccupied with the problem of moral choice in the face of absurdity. The two books received a due measure of critical success, and qualified Barth as one of the promising young talents on the American scene...
...plants dissatisfied Barth came to writing by was of literary studies--he is now a professor of English-and he knew too much of what fiction could be to be satisfied with what his fiction way. The construction of the realistic novel embarrassed him--the naming of characters, the filling in of backgrounds, the painstaking drawing up of climax and resolution. Why call his hero Lodd Andrews? And why have him resolve to commit suicide and why then change his mind? With an infinity of possibilities, choice implies reasons, and reasons and good reasons. But Barth had no good reasons...
...Barth's best bits of technique is to have Scheherazade get each night's installment from a Barth-like writer who magically appears each day after boning up on his copy of The Arabian Nights. They also talk of mutual prob lems with such tenderness and under standing that the question of who is muse and who is bemused becomes a beautiful irrelevance. For Barth, a writ er who must keep himself going with self-conscious irony and ambiguity and tricks, Scheherazade is a literary dream girl. She told stories only out of the most urgent necessity...