The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories   by John Barth

Houghton Mifflin, New York : 2004                        August  2004 Book Reviews

I've been an amateur ( is there any other kind ?) Barth scholar since my schoolboy days in the 1960's, when my father left his first edition of Giles Goat Boy where I could reach it. It is a fantastic story, of course, and it was one of the things that finally convinced me it would be worth my while to learn a lot - in order to get all the jokes and allusions in the book. Nearly forty years later I'm still working on it.

I am, however, going to reserve judgement on The Book of Ten Nights and a Night. I am going to have to read it again. Now, I don't give a fig what sort of fellow John Barth is. As the novelist Margaret Atwood famously pointed out, wanting to meet an author because you like his writing is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate. Ten Nights' protagonist, however - and so, one suspects, Barth himself - appears to be the sort of increasingly unavoidable nudnik whose Tourette-like political nonsequitors cause one to fold one's napkin and politely excuse one's self from the dinner table.

Look, the book is brilliant, no question about it. Barth, being the consumate postmodernist, well, one doesn't quite know how to take him, which is of course an essential feature of his works' charm. The protagonist's sloganeering revolted me, but I could not turn away. Is it Barth ? Is it Barth on the Barth a Barth would be expected to be in the current epoch ? How many Barths could a bad Barth bear if a bad Barth bade Barth birth ?

I'll be back.

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