Best for those who consider Barth an essential contemporary writer—whose numbers may be, well, “contracting.”
The storytelling urge, in old age and under duress, as seen in the veteran postmodernist’s latest collection.
The framework of these variously related tales consists of ongoing playfully erotic conversations (and conjoinings) shared by an aging writer (“Graybard”) and his lissome body-painted “Muse,” rather archly named WYSIWYG (meaning “What you see is what you get”). The setting is (Barth’s usual) Maryland’s Eastern shore, during the 11 days that follow the bombing of the World Trade Center. Graybard wonders whether stories still matter in a world so ruthlessly destructive. And WYSIWYG affably deconstructs and disses the “Hendecameron” (so named in homage to Boccaccio) he nevertheless assembles, rudely questioning his metafictional toying with variant versions of “a non-story that becomes a Story by acknowledging that it isn’t one.” Undeterred, Graybard offers “stories” about narrative possibility (inspired by a recovered wedding ring, the near-convergence of a cat struck and killed by a car and a missing autistic boy found in a remote marshland). Noodling about writers’ dreams (“A Detective and a Turtle”) and the notion that both the physical universe and human possibility are contracting (“The Big Shrink,” “Extension”) yield mixed results—as do “9999,” in which confluences of numbers have possibly “causative” characteristics, and “Click,” which laboriously riffs on contrasts and linkages between virtual and “real” reality. Barth (Coming Soon!!!, 2001, etc.) does better with a sly science-fiction premise in “The Rest of Your Life,” and a retired teacher’s intuition that the declining birth rate presages a rejection of human “continuity” in “And Then There’s the One.” But the volume relapses into coy self-reflexiveness, and the reader nods. Barth’s conviction that characters and plots, beginnings and endings aren’t stories’ central concerns becomes, once again, initially stimulating, increasingly puzzling, ultimately dissatisfying.
Best for those who consider Barth an essential contemporary writer—whose numbers may be, well, “contracting.”Pub Date: April 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-40566-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
IN THE NEWS
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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