Algebra and Fire

There’s nothing fair about it, but we judge dead writers by their best works, living writers by their latest. To make matters worse, we often judge a writer’s latest book by his or her earlier work, provoking Kurt Vonnegut’s famous complaint about that Kurt Vonnegut fellow he was forced to compete with.

If the writer happens to be someone like John Barth, who is closely associated with postmodernist fiction, he may also be held responsible for the perceived deficiencies of that narrative development (you know: overweening self-consciousness, self-indulgent wordplay, willful obscurity, etc.). In fact, the “hack-attack” assailing innovative fiction has become a kind of sub-genre among mainstream reviews. If these guys would only dispense with the tomfoolery and write straightforward realism, they might make it as writers.

Now an octogenarian, Barth has produced at least two books in each of the past seven decades. During that time, he’s never written realism. Never will. To judge him by the standards of the realistic novel is to ignore his donnée, violating the Jamesian dictum that remains the sine qua non of any responsible book review.

Barth announced his donnée very early in his career. “A different way to come to terms with the discrepancy between art and the Real Thing,” he said in a 1965 interview, “is to affirm the artificial element in art (you can’t get rid of it anyhow), and make the artifice part of you point.” Of course, Barth’s point also includes the postmodernist tenet that the Real Thing is itself a kind of artifice in the sense that any objectivist description of “reality,” including those found in so-called realistic fiction, is inescapably situated and therefore at best incomplete. In the human realm, that is, facts are always already mediated by consciousness and symbol systems.

To reinforce this idea, Barth’s work draws attention to its own structural and formal qualities, then re-angles that reflexivity back to the “real” world and the human beings who occupy it. Although they epitomize the stylistic hallmarks of postmodernism, his books are never merely virtuoso performances. “My feeling about technique in art,” he told an interviewer in 1968, “is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.” That formula has served Barth well for over half a century.

Barth’s seventeenth work of fiction, Every Third Thought abounds in both technical dexterity and heartfelt poignancy. The novel begins where The Development (2008), the short story series immediately preceding it, left off, just after a rogue tornado has wiped out the Florida-style gated community where G. I. Newett (he of the punning cognomen) lives with his younger wife Amanda Todd. In Every Third Thought, George Newett reprises his tripartite role as protagonist, narrator, and, ultimately, author of the novel we’re reading. Indeed, Newett’s wrestling over just what kind of novel he wants to write propels much of the novel’s energy. Thus, the writing process forms a central element in the novel’s plot, so that references to that process, which would constitute metafictional foregrounding in another context (some of more self-referential stories in Lost in the Funhouse [1968], for example), become wholly appropriate to the work’s “realistic” base.

This technique is, of course, Barth’s latest variation on an old trick, which Barth, after Umberto Eco, calls “double coding,” having it both ways with illusionism and anti-illusionism by naturalizing rather than flaunting artifice. Notice how he handles the skein of coincidences layering this novel, for example. Newett’s novel-in-progress is precipitated by a fall and resulting “head bang” on the entrance-step of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the Newett/Todds are visiting during Amanda’s final sabbatical leave from, yes, Stratford College in Avon County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. George’s...