Straight from the ivory tower—here's the ultimate, unreadable academic novel, and, sadly, the fiercest ammunition imaginable for John Gardner's self-righteous "moral fiction" crusade. In a grand gesture of self-advertisement and apparent desperation, Barth has taken characters from five of his six previous books—Todd Andrews from The Floating Opera, Jacob Homer from The End of the Road, Adolph Mensch from Lost in the Funhouse, Jerome (Harold) Bray from Giles Goat-Boy, various descendants of Ebenezer Cooke (The Sot-Weed Factor)—and he has them all writing letters in 1969: aging Todd writes to his dead father about the recurring patterns of his life and his rediscovery of sex with old flame Jane Mack and (probably incest) Jane's daughter Jeannine; Jacob Homer writes to himself in the loony bin, obsessed with numbers, anniversaries, and his tragic past; Bray and his LILYVAC II continue to pursue fiction-by-computer and write John Barth to threaten him with a plagiarism suit over Giles Goat-Boy; Adolph Mensch outlines his plan for a Perseus fiction; and the various Cookes chronicle the family history from about 1750 to 1820, which takes in Teeumseh, Byron, Madame de Stael, Fulton, the Burning of Washington, the Battle of New Orleans, and a plan to rescue Napoleon from Elba. But the biggest letter-writer of all is a new character, 50-year-old Germaine G. Pitt (Lady Amherst)—acting provost of Marshyhope State University, long-ago mistress to Joyce, Huxley, and Hesse ("he liked me to dress in lederhosen"), now the lustily Joycean mistress of Adolph Mensch, and related in one precious way or another to all the other characters. Plus: Barth himself writes to all these folks, asking their permission to put them in his new book, promising that, through these 88 letters and 864 pages, "Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising tide, the plot will surge forward. . . ." Unfortunately, that's not what happens, despite a highly contrived effort to connect these characters and bring them together for some campus/radical/terrorist hoopla. Nor do Barth's much-proclaimed themes here—life's second cycles, history's "reenactments"—hold things together; and the comedy/parody is more often strained than wild, especially since such literary gamesplaying is by now old stuff (Borges, Nabokov) that's been improved upon by Barthelme, Sorrentino, and even Woody Allen. What remains is a self-indulgent mishmash that not only fails but also puts an odd retroactive taint on the earlier novels: by shoving his past conceits up against each other, Barth reveals just how frail they all are—and that his various voices, whatever the ornate embellishments, are essentially just one wordy, arch, allusive voice. For Barth's fellow academics, then: an elaborate playpen to crawl around in. For those who know and love all of the earlier novels—some possible amusement. For most everyone else—a sorry spectacle, baroque and listless, noisy and busy and smug and empty.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1979
ISBN: 1564780619
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.
A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.
Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls—less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought—and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line—mostly successfully—between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book’s final third.
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7737-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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