Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth, and: Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self and Postmodern American Fiction (review)
the uses and craft of fiction. Headnotes throughout, many quite substantial, recall the circumstances prompting and shaping each piece and, in conjunction with the generally self-referential essays, lay out Barth's aesthetics while offering notes toward an autobiography (not surprisingly, sibling concerns for an author who asserts that "It is not speaking mystically to say that our dreams dream us; that our fictions construct us"). Few of the loves of Barth's life revealed here should anaphrodize the lusty reader. Perhaps, to change metaphors slightly, Barth does not always dive deeply into his subject (he'd prefer the Chesapeake Bay) or stay down long. No matter, for he dives so well. Others may find him self-indulgent, superficial, stylewise too cute, tiresome in his obsessions (he returns to Scheherazade oftener than Shahryar ever did). But I understand such complaints as I understand that others find diving competitions serious business: I feel the attraction of neither, finding even Barth's bellyflops elegant, surprising, and personably straightforward. "The gifts of doing and explaining are notoriously not the same," Barth observes at one point: "An eloquent artist may sound like a mumbler, a crank, a soulless pedant . . . when he sets about accounting for what he has perhaps brilliantly done." And elsewhere, apropos interviews: "[the writer's] business is the considered word, not the spontaneous." For such reasons, Voicelust and Conversations sometimes falter. Barth rarely flounders, never drowns. Those at all interested in fiction will want to read TAe Friday Book. In its passionate virtuosity, the allure of its voice is but one of its charms.