T.G.I.F.

In 1984, at the age of fifty-four, John Barth published his first collection of essays, lectures, and other nonfiction pieces. The book was entitled The Friday Book because, at that time, Barth spent his Fridays writing nonfiction—a routine which he continued for the next thirty years. Both Barth and his wife were teachers, and they took advantage of their Monday-through-Thursday teaching schedules to escape from Baltimore for long weekends across the Chesapeake Bay at their eastern shore retreat in Chestertown, Maryland. Barth found that composing nonfiction on Friday was not only a “logistical convenience,” as he did not need “to haul the accumulating notes, drafts, and research materials for whatever novel was in the works back and forth across the Bay,” but that it was also an important departure from his weekday morning routine of “scratching away at some extended prose fiction.”

A second collection of Friday writing, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984–1994, followed in 1995. Now in 2012, at the age of 82, he has published Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995–, which is indicated as his “final” collection of nonfiction. However, the open-ended date in his subtitle leaves the door open for what would be a most welcome fourth volume of Friday writings.

Final Fridays is divided into two sections: the larger “On Reading, Writing, and the State of the Art,” and “Tributes and Memoria.” Barth discusses a wide range of writers and writings, but a few appear repeatedly and clearly play an important role in his own literary life. Two that stand large are Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and the essay “‘The Parallels!’: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges” is one of the liveliest in the book.

Barth presents both Borges and Calvino as writers for whom politics plays only a marginal role in their work: of Borges, Barth reports that “he said that only once did he break his own rule against political writing”; of Calvino, Barth says that while he “came to describe himself as a ‘political agnostic,’ he maintained a lively interest in the Italian political scene and wrote scathingly of the assassination of Aldo Moro.” His framing of the relationship of politics to the art of Borges and Calvino is representative of his own relationship to politics throughout the collection: Barth by and large avoids it in his discussions of reading, writing, and the state of the art.

The major exception to this is found in a rejected piece that turns out to be one of the most exciting entries in the collection. “The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American” was originally commissioned in 2002 by the State Department as part of a collection to be distributed to U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. The collection was meant to “illustrate American values through having various authors consider what makes them an American writer.” Barth’s essay, which closes with a scalding indictment of the Bush administration’s responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center, was rejected for its “explicit commentary on the events of September 11.” The essay, subsequently first published in Italian translation in the anthology Undici settembre in 2003, opens its final section as follows: “Now: As a matter of biographical fact, I happen to be no fan of the present administration in Washington, or of U.S. unilateralism in foreign affairs: No anti-ABM or anti-landmine treaties or Kyoto protocols or International Court of Justice for us Yanks, thanks!” Barth’s directness here stands out in a collection otherwise bereft of political engagements, and provides an interesting view of another area of his thought.

“The muses,” writes Barth, “care not a whit about our personal profiles, and not much more than a whit about our politics; their sole concern is that we achieve the high country of Mounts Helicon and Parnassus, whether despite or because of where we’re coming from, and this these two elevated spirits [Borges and Calvino] consistently did.” Barth’s...