Collected Stories

August 3, 2015
The work of John Barth, whose novels defined the postmodern ’60s even as they gestured in the direction of Scheherazade and Boccaccio, is in dire need of reassessment, which makes a Collected Stories welcome. Four Barth collections are assembled by Dalkey, including 1968’s Lost in the Funhouse, generally regarded as a masterpiece. And rightfully so, with its carnivalesque deconstruction of the coming-of-age story (the title story and others), revisionist Greek myths (“Echo”), and upending of literary conventions both minimal (“Title”) and maximal (“Anonymiad”) exhilarating as ever. Barth’s next collection, On with the Story, didn’t appear until 1996 and there’s something noticeably labored in the cadence of the writer/narrator who theorizes fruitlessly around his protagonists (Cape Cod professorial types mostly) who theorize an awful lot on their own works (One story begins, “‘Are we particles,’ Amy wants to know, ‘or waves?’”). But the other two collections—2004’s The Book of Ten Nights and a Night and 2008’s The Development—are a revelation, the first being essentially a series of false starts by a writer called Graybard in the wake of 9/11 and the second a series of nested suburban yarns set in a gated community, where the conversation and atmosphere is thick with Bush-era malaise. This is a hefty omnibus, clocking in at 800 pages, and may be a bit overwhelming to neophytes of the author. But for Barth devotees, it’s a gift to have so much in one place.

August 15, 2015
A monumental assemblage of this antic author's short fiction, most of it steeped in the literary history and postmodernist contortions of "that peculiarly American species, the writer in the university." Each of the four collections gathered here has stories closely related by characters, themes, and stylistic high jinks, accommodating the preference Barth (Every Third Thought, 2011, etc.) notes in his introduction for the long form of the novel. They also reflect the writer's constant parsing and playing with narrative conventions in metafictional outings that began with the Borges-influenced, multilayered confections of his first collection, Lost in the Funhouse (1968). "Menelaiad," for tortuous instance, retells some of the Troy legend with mind-boggling embedding of multiple narrators like matryoshka dolls. On With the Story (1996) dials down the meta moments while including a Barth avatar who alludes to Funhouse. The story titled " 'Waves, ' by Amien Richard," is fairly straightforward as two travel writers seek a good snorkeling site while painfully avoiding a shared tragedy. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004) nods to all Barth's favorite tale-tellers-Homer, Scheherazade, and Boccaccio-while a writer named Graybard and his Muse discuss "narrative" in sections linking the book's actual narratives-including four pages that look like musical notations for a song containing the one word "help." That the 11 nights are those following the terrorist attacks on 9/11 shows Barth venturing out of the ivory ziggurat and contemplating a "nation in shock." More conventional are the stories of a Maryland gated community in 2008's The Development. They have a comic take on community and an intimate sense of aging-Barth was almost 80 at that time. Still, he can't resist his bookish japes, as with a writing student who presents one project in text written all over her young flesh. As part of Barth's challenging postmodernist corpus, the short stories offer smaller doses of the odd pleasures and strains of a restless intelligence and its relentless gaming of the literary system.

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