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CHIMERA by JOHN BARTH 308 pages. Random House...
...John Barth is one of those hyper-talented writers who must continually prove that the world of fiction is round, not flat, as most novels would lead one to believe. The problem is that Barth keeps turning up afterward looking as fresh as if he had only just come back from a day sail. From The Floating Opera and The End of the Road to The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, there is no real urgency in Earth's novels. His characters exhibit a comfortable, charming nihilism. Fat with alternatives, they can change roles as easily...
Chimera is a coy variation on a number of Barth's favorite themes. Composed in three parts, "Dunyaza-diad," "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad," the book is largely a gag at the expense of conventional literary forms. Instead of having characters symbolize archetypes as most novelists do, Barth uses the archetypes themselves as characters. Fortunately for the reader, Barth -who is also an English professor at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York -provides a pony. (Pegasus by any name is just as helpful.) As he explains in Chimera: "Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations...
...deign to consider what is best in less-consistent realms of endeavor until it is overvalued by the unthinking others. Aside from that of Charles Thomas Samuels, the film writing Rahv has published has been obtuse: theater is totally absent, television not even acknowledged. Serious literary tricksters (Barth, Gass and Barthelme) who are trying to engage in their own kind of criticism of our language and outworn genres, are barely acknowledged...
This philosophy of nihilism leaves Dawes with a choice: he can either commit suicide, thus rejecting a meaningless life, or he can as Todd Andrews did in John Barth's The Floating Opera, conclude that he might as well live on because suicide is also meaningless...