Letters by John Barth (review)

Book Reviews pays off in friendship" in Baker's revision, and examples could be multiplied . Nevertheless, passages of advanced writing still abound, as do literary references and literary examples, and one suspects that use of Baker's text by teachers originally trained in and most comfortable with literature will continue. The main change in this most recent, 1980 edition isa welcome reduction in length; the 1976 version perhaps tried to do too many things. Otherwise, there is little of importance which is new in the present text. There is, however, one interesting and perhaps significant omission; Baker's description of the classical form of an oration which had held an important place in earlier versions, only to be shifted about later on, has now gone the way of many classical and wonderful things; it has completely disappeared. ROBERT SHENK, Air Force Academy John Barth, Letters. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1979. 772 p. $16.95. John Barth's Letters is an expansive, contrived, ingenious tour de force. Like The Floating Opera and The End Of The Road, it brims with intelligent thought. Like The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, it is darkly, comically aware that it is a fictional creation. And like Lost In The Funhouse and the National Book Award winning Chimera, it is above all a fiction aware of an awareness of itself. This sense of collective momentum is appropriate since many of the major characters of Barth's earlier work (among them, Jacob Horner, Tod Andrews, Ambrose Mensch) reappear here and present themselves through correspondence. The private turmoil to be found in Barth's Letters is a reflection of the year in which they were written, 1969. Radical activism, a moon shot, lunatic cybernetics and the like counterpoint the lives of Barth's correspondents. Ordered, civilized life—public and private- —seems to be giving way by the instant to disorder and anarchy. The central thematic tug of this epistolary novel is to be found in its title. The novel which imitates the letter is more suited to the concerns of Barth's time frame than one which imitates a historical account, say, or a biography. Where the history or biography are accounts of events past, ev/ents refined retrospectively by the author to form a reasonable, consequential whole, the letter is written "to the minute," as Samuel Richardson would have it, written moment by moment without a proper beginning or end of the chronology available. If Barth embraces the epistolary form, however, he recognizes as well that it is anachronistic. A product primarily of the 18th century, it assumes that an exterior and interior reality are both comprehensible and articulatable—an assumption Barth's characters, living through the Walpurgisnacht of the late sixties as they do, are ill-advised to accept. Both an indictment and an imitation, Letters is a parody in the most far-reaching sense—not just of literary convention, but of reason's struggle to make sense of unreason; and the struggle of art and the artist, forever in the middle, to locate the beginning and the end. JAY M. BOYER, Arizona State University ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW· 267 ...