Word: past
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LIKE A LITERARY KRONOS, John Barth has stuffed each of his fictional offspring down his maw and let forth an echoing belch of a novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what Barth does in the privacy of his own imagination is his own business; the worst atrocity he reserves for the hapless reader. The siren call of Barth's in-souciance, his cleverness, his recklessness, beckons you towards a grinding crash on the rocks surrounding these 750 pages, and a lonely...
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...
...LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls it "an epidemic rage for reenactment." Andrews draws up a detailed schedule of the events that led up to his first decision to commit suicide, and realizes he's reliving it all, and heading in the same direction. Each generation in the exhaustive family history of the Cook/Burlingame clan spends the first...
Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort of literary autism. That's it--the burden of the past: not a roster of great literary forebears but the author's own bibliography. Barth is getting older, and he hasn't found his Theme. Letters is his middle-age-crisis objectified into a monstrosity. No one can fault Barth...
Shaplen takes more dangerous risks when he abandons armchair criticisms and turns to present-day issues. He doesn't hesitate to discuss China's recent incursions into Vietnam, the refugee problem, or the Cambodian-Vietnamese situation. Lucid, insightful and delightfully straightforward, the author recounts the past and predicts the future. Shaplen is no dummy; when he doesn't know what will happen, he says so. On China, he writes, "No matter how many crystal balls one uses, it is patently impossible to foresee the future evolution of the Chinese Communist Party." Where a lesser writer would have struggled to find...