Word: ende
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht's and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose's phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation...
...same public stature, in fact, very little has been written about him: he made a fortune in shoe-manufacturing, and the Pusey Library archives hold a slim volume on the gigantic endowments he left to Harvard. Though he arrives at his true life circumstances by the end of the novel, McKay first undertakes a long fictional journey to Kansas and back. McMahon has given him depth, complicated his life, and intersected his life with other', real and fictional. But in the end the real McKay surfaces, a great deal more intriguing for the reader than such a philanthropist would have...
...hero, a young short story writer named Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan's dilemma concerns the purpose of his art: is his ultimate responsibility to himself or his Jewish heritage? Even the writer of the Bible must have paused to consider the personal and social consequences of his creation. In the end, Nathan, like Roth, chooses to write for himself and let the kleenex fall where they may. "There is obviously no simple way to be great," says Nathan...