Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Petty theft, book mutilation and other outrages, to be sure, have now come to seem somehow integral to the very notion of "public" in the mind of most library users. But the prevailing mood is still one of gratitude. A few days ago, Sidney Carroll, 66, a television writer and a library addict, leaned back from his notes on the turn-of-the-century Arms Tycoon Basil Zaharoff and reflected aloud: "One of the reasons I live in New York is this library. I love this room. It's hot, but not too much. The types outside the library...
Barth's career is germane not only because it is one of the most interesting in contemporary letters but also because it literally dictated Letters. The subject of the book, some ten years in the writing, is the body of Barth's previous fiction. Letters is a vast hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting earlier reflections. After two decades of preparation, Barth has finally lost himself in his own funhouse...
...possible to respect and admire the tenacity that drove the author to this pass. It is possible to state that no student of fiction will be able to ignore the existence of Letters. But it is almost impossible to read the book. Pore over, dip into, muse about, trace patterns through, yes. Follow it willingly and comfortably from beginning...
...Barth seems to have taken pains to make his letter writers as unattractive and self-absorbed as possible. He is one of them, thus dryly joining the ranks of the fictitious who think themselves actual, and five of the others either figure in or are suggested by his earlier books. The seventh is Lady Amherst, a fiftyish British widow who has fetched up on the Eastern Shore as a visiting lecturer at a jerk water Maryland college. As the new girl in the book, she commands initial attention and then numbed disbelief. It is not just her Olympian long-windedness...
Fate, working through coincidences, performs several kinds of malevolent interventions. In one brilliant scene. Jade's father, walking in Manhattan, spots David across the street and rushes after him in a rage; he is crushed to death in the traffic. Among other things, the book could be read as a grand parody of the idea that the course of true love never runs smooth. At last, David ends in jail, for breaking parole, if not for shattering all the lives around him. Jade vanishes into the oblivion of an unknowable domestic life with another man, a subsiding into reality...