Carver Made Him Look Prissy, David Foster Wallace Rendered Him Unhip

May 27, 2020 2:24 PM

John Barth Deserves a Wider Audience by John Domini for LitHub
posted by chavenet (13 comments total)

I love John Barth, and this article is a good kick in the pants to read his later work! For those without the interest to read the novella Chimera, the short story Menelaiad also exhibits his style and mastery.
posted by watermelon at 2:45 PM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yes, for "Sot-Weed Factor" and no for "Giles Goat Boy". Barth took advantage of the good will he earned with his gracefully written, entertaining, non-experimental works, to win sales for his unreadable, self-indulgent, anti-reader novels and short stories. Now that he's writing what I agree are these wonderful late-career fictions, and no one's paying attention to him - well, you reap what you sow. Sixties experimental fiction has not aged well.
posted by Modest House at 4:07 PM on May 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

John Barth taught me it was possible to fuck a tree.
posted by blakewest at 4:16 PM on May 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

well, you reap what you sow. Sixties experimental fiction has not aged well.

Cool story bro. (Do you really think that The Sot-Weed Factor was not experimental fiction?)
posted by kenko at 4:31 PM on May 27, 2020 [9 favorites]

I unfortunately read the whole of Giles Goat Boy, didn't go back to Barth. I should give his shorter fiction another try.
posted by benzenedream at 4:58 PM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I hated "The Sot-Weed Factor". Where do I even start? I really loved his hyper-meta short stories "Click" and "Puttermesser in Paradise" though. (Anybody know where I might find them?)
posted by blue shadows at 11:08 PM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Fuck the reader, fuck this bull shit naturalism, fuck spoon feeding people, fuck refusing ambition, fuck being ruled--american fiction got worse when we let dull tales of bougie adultery win--Barths late novels are worse, because he lost his ambition and his strangeness, trying to catch up instead of working on his own space. as a reader, i don't want to be coddled.
posted by PinkMoose at 12:00 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

I read one book by him and didn't feel very much about it either way. I plan to go back to him eventually.

As a semi-related aside, another author that should be re-examined is Robert Coover. When he was bad (avoid the fairy tales and bondage stuff), he was pretty damn bad, but when he was good (his longer works), he was really fucking good. I have never encountered a more uneven author, but I am glad that I took the time to read all of his stuff over the last year.
posted by bootlegpop at 2:10 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have only read The End of the Road, it was assigned reading in college. But I really enjoyed it. I think it was one of the first books I read where the story itself wasn't the point. It really kind of changed my outlook on thinking and analyzing life in general.

One thing that stuck with me, there's a discussion in the novel about how everyone chooses what they do. Everything is a choice. You are doing what you are doing because you have decided that this produces an outcome that you prefer over other outcomes. That thinking actually really helped me alot in relationships.

Maybe I should read the Floating Opera too. And check out some of his other works.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:50 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Tidewater Tales is probably in the running for my favorite novel. It’s certainly in me pretty deeply. An adult friend handed me a stack of books when I was about 14 that included Barth’s The End of the Road and one other of Barth’s books. (Labyrinths by Borges was in the stack too.) I ended up reading most of his novels in high school and was taken by his care in showing the construction of the story without overwhelming the humanity of the stories. The Tidewater Tales seemed to me the most impressively playful and humane of his books. I was a kid reading about something of a midlife crisis and was drawn in completely.

The only one I didn’t finish was The Sot Weed Factor in which the protagonist gets stuck listening to an extremely long winded and dull story and Barth asks the reader to slog through a chapter’s worth of intentional dullness to feel it themselves. I never could get to the end of that bit.
posted by putzface_dickman at 3:08 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Amen! Probably the author who has most influenced my thinking. I think about the 'ladder of wit' from the Sot-Weed Factor weekly after having read it two decades ago. And when I discovered in 1992 while reading the Floating Opera that I was sitting within a block of where the novel was (mostly) set, well, that was a moment! Such a clever and thoughtful writer. His vision of the world and how it works is mine too, probably thanks to him. Thank God he picked up a pen!
posted by Patapsco Mike at 4:04 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have never read any Barth, though I recognized the name. What jumps out at me looking at his Wikipedia entry is how he went from a MA to a professorship and a 40-year academic career. How utterly unpossible that would be today. Yet how much thinking about academic careers presumes that it might not be?
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:08 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nice. I had just recommended Barth the other day in this ask.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:31 PM on May 28, 2020