Word: barthes
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...makes more sense visually than verbally--vide: Wheels within wheels--but why bother? Barth, officious, is at your shoulder with an answer before you can ask the question...
...might notice that these characters don't write to each other at all. At different times their stories overlap, and by the end of Letters they're all related by marriage or adultery. But Barth's assumption of the epistolary novelist's cloak is a fiction: Letters shares nothing with models like Richardson's Clarissa...
...still want to assay the bulk of Letters--out of a sentimental attachment to Barth's brilliant earlier epic-length efforts, Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor, or out of sheer quixotic nerve--you could take the advice of Jacob Horner, formerly the protagonist of The End of the Road and now a pawn wandering Barth's checkerboard...
Removing the mystique of a meaningful, message-laden blueprint leaves a mere bunch of letters--letters as alphabetical characters, letters as missives; Barth gleefully invests his puns with more significance than they deserve...
REGURGITATIVELY, Barth lifts his characters, these war correspondents of the literary battlefield, from each of his past books. The one new creation, Lady Amherst, is also the best. Her sequence of letters to the author describes the progress of her affair with Ambrose Mensch, a dilettante writer late of Lose in the Funhouse. Barth makes a feeble effort to set her up as an allegorical representation of "Belles Lettres," on which her--or Ambrose--hopes to father forth a new novel, but she balks, her past liaisons with famous men of letters notwithstanding...