BARTH
25, 2005), "Barker leaves us with an old-fashioned
message: we're all trapped in boxes, and we can't
be freed by the contents of our boxlike televisions,
computers, iPods and cellphones, which only
encourage us to 'hold life cheap.'"
Nicola Barker lives in Hackney, a borough of
East London, with her long-term boyfriend (the
music journalist Ben Thompson) and her two dogs.
In January 2003 she was named one of Britain's
best writers under the age of 40 by Granta
magazine.
-K.D.
© Giovanni Photography 2001/Courtesy of Houghton
Mifflin
Barth, John
May 27, 1930- Novelist; short-story writer;
essayist
John Barth is considered a leading practitioner,
along with such writers as William Gass and
Robert Coover, of the postmodern literary style
known as metafiction, which places as much
emphasis on exposing the artifice of story-writing
as on the telling of the story itself. "Good art in any
medium," Barth told Patrick T. Reardon for the
Chicago Tribune (january 2, 2006), "is seldom
simply but nearly always also about itself. My
stories are seldom simply but nearly always also
about Storytelling, for better or for worse. But love,
pain, mortality, & such have more than walk-on
Suggested Reading: (London) Evening Standard
p17 May 10, 2000, p30 May 12, 2000; (London)
Independent pl0 Feb. 6, 2000; (London) Times
July 18, 1996, Feb. 12, 2000; (New York)
Newsday B p14 Nov. 1, 1998; New York Times
VII p7 Dec. 29, 2002; Washington Post T p6 Apr.
6, 2003
Selected Books: short stories-Love Your
Enemies, 1993; Heading Inland, 1996; The Three
Button Trick, and Other Stories, 1999; novels-
Reversed Forecast, 1994; Small Holdings, 1995;
Wide Open, 1998; Five Miles from Outer Hope,
2000; Behindlings, 2003; Clear: A Transparent
Novel,2005
roles as well, I hope. The Teller who's aware that
he's storytelling is as old as storytelling itself."
Barth's many works of fiction-including Giles
Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968),
Letters (1979), Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), and
Coming Soon!!! (2001)-are noted for their
complex, involuted style, a concern with mythic
personalities and themes, and a flair for humor and
linguistic hijinks-as well as for their ability to
divide critics. To his adamant admirers he
combines daring originality with a deft sense of
parody; to his detractors his predilication for self-
reflexive narratives results in novels lacking
genuine characters and psychological insight.
Barth's stature has waned slightly since the 1960s
and 1970s, when postmodernism was making
waves, but his early books continue to be read by
college literature students, and most critics
concede that, as his influence on such well-known
authors as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers
suggests, he has had a significant impact on
modern American letters.
John Simmons Barth was born in Cambridge,
Maryland, on May 27, 1930 to John Jacob Barth, a
candy-store owner, and Georgia (Simmons) Barth.
He has a twin sister, Jill, and an older brother,
William. In an interview with Mopsy Strange
Kennedy for the Washington Post (September 2,
1967), Barth's father commented on his son's
literary bent: "This talent must have come later. I
didn't notice it when he was younger. He always
liked stories, though-I like to tell stories myself.
Funny stories." Barth's twin sister, Jill, recalled to
Kennedy: "He's always been more serious than
outgoing. . . . He got a lot of things without trying
very hard at school." Of their father's influence she
said: "If there is a thread it comes from him-no
particular talent, but just creative ability passed
along in some form." Barth's brother told the
interviewer: "Looking back I'd never have
expected him to be a writer .... I will say he
always had a vivid, overactive imagination ....
What amazes me is how he imagines so much
when he's experienced so little. . . . He's a
47
~<XIlle:-. and an iconoclast. In a way I don't
understand him: he's a mystery to me."
Barth's fir t aspiration was to make music. In
his school he played drums in the school band,
and after graduation he enrolled at the Juilliard
School of Music, in New York City, to study
orchestration. Partly for financial reasons he left
Juilliard after one term and transferred to Johns
Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, as a
journalism major. At Johns Hopkins he
experienced what he has called his "love affair"
with Scheherazade-the heroine storyteller of The
Book of One Thousand and One Nights (also
known as The Thousand Nights and a Night and
Arabian Nights). "As an illiterate undergraduate,"
he recalled in an article for the New York Herald
Tribune (September 26, 1965), "I worked off part
of my tuition filing books in the Classics Library at
Johns Hopkins, which included the stacks of the
Oriental Seminary. One was permitted to get lost
for hours in that splendiferous labyrinth and
intoxicate, engorge oneself with story. Especially I
became enamoured of the great talecycles and
collections: Somadeva's Ocean of Story in ten huge
volumes, [Sir Richard] Burton's Thousand Nights
and a Night in twelve, the Panchatantra, the Gesta
Romanorum, the Novellini, and the Pent-Hept- and
Decameron .... Most of those spellbinding liars I
have forgotten, but never Scheherazade."
In The Book of One Thousand and One Nights,
Scheherazade, to prevent her jealous husband from
executing her, tells him every night a new story
that leaves him in suspense until the following
day. "Though the tales [Scheherazade] tells are not
my favorites, she remains my favorite teller," Barth
explained in his New York Herald Tribune article.
"Like a parable of [Franz] Kafka's or a great myth,
the story of deflowered Scheherazade, yarning
tirelessly through the dark hours to save her neck,
corresponds to a number of things at once and
flashes meaning from all its facets. For me its rich
dark circumstances, mixing the subtle and the
coarse, the comic and the grim, the realistic and the
fantastic, the apocalyptic and the hopeful, figure,
among other things, both the estate of the fictioner
in general and the particular endeavors and
aspirations of this one, at least, who can wish
nothing better than to spin like that vizier's
excellent daughter, through what nights remain to
him, tales within tales, full-stored with
'description and discourse and rare traits and
anecdotes and moral instances and reminiscences
. .. proverbs and parables, chronicles and
pleasantries, quips and jests, stories and ...
dialogues and histories and elegies and other
verses. . .' until he and his scribblings are fetched
low by the Destroyer of Delights." Other major
formative influences on Barth were Kafka, James
Joyce, and Thomas Mann. Barth received
bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins, in 1951,
and a master's degree, from the same institution, in
1952.
48
Barth began writing short stories while he was
still a student. The idea for Barth's first novel, The
Floating Opera (1956), was inspired by a
showboat-a river steamer with a theater and
actors on board-that used to ply the tidewater
Maryland area when he was a child. "When I came
across a photograph of that old show boat in 1954,"
he told John Enck for Wisconsin Studies in
Contemporary Literature (Winter-Spring 1965), "I
thought it would be a good idea to write a
philosophical minstrel show .... I started to do it
and it ended up being a novel instead." The
narrator of The Floating Opera is Todd Andrews,
a rakish tidewater lawyer with an absurdist
philosophy of life. He plans to commit suicide out
of existentialist boredom but changes his mind
when he realizes that killing himself would be just
as meaningless as any other action in his life. The
novel ends with Andrews coming to terms with an
existence bereft of absolutes: "A value is no less
authentic ... for its being relative .... These
[relative values] at least we have, and if they are all
we have, then in no way whatsoever are they
inferior." Melvyn Bragg, writing for the London
Observer (September 2, 1968), noted that the
philosophizing was carried out with Barth's
characteristic "intellectual agility, gossipy tone,
[and] comic brio."
Barth's second novel, The End of the Road, was
published in 1958. In it Jacob Horner, paralyzed by
indecision about everything, is advised by his
psychotherapist to seek a cure in role-playing.
Accordingly, he becomes a teacher of prescriptive
grammar at a Maryland teachers college, where he
clashes with an opposite personality type, Joe
Morgan, and seduces Morgan's wife, Rennie. The
comedy of manners-in which psychiatric and
academic jargon are parodied-ends tragically,
with Rennie choking to death on her own vomit
during an illegal abortion. Some critics found the
book tasteless, but Talliaferro Boatwright asserted
in the New York Herald Tribune (July 20, 1958):
"Given his premise that we live in a world without
standards, taste becomes a side issue, not to be
considered. Whether or not his diagnosis of the
plight of modern man, and his prognosis of his fate,
are correct, he has stated them persuasively."
Barth moved away from realistic fiction with his
third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). The story
of a tobacco peddler named Ebenezer Cooke, his
twin sister, and their tutor, it is set in the
Restoration era and is written in the spirit and
language of that period. "It is a huge sprawling
book, filled with dry, rarefied quips," Douglas M.
Davis wrote for the National Observer (February
15, 1965). "It parodies at once the grand costume
novel, Elizabethan literature, Ph.D. theses, and
mankind at large." Richard McLaughlin observed
for the Springfield Republican (September 25,
a 1960) that "in spite of the wild vagaries ... his
book does have ... a genuine seriousness at the
bottom of its racy, comic adventures .... The fact
that . . . Ebenezer has a none too easy time of it

maintaining his virtue in an unvirtuous world
rather points up the serious moral of this
boisterously diverting farce."
For his fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy, Barth
reimagined the political poles of the Cold War
world as two campuses: one ostensibly
symbolizing the capitalist West and the other the
communist East. Each campus is under the control
of a monster computer. For the Informationalist
New Tammany College, the computer is named
WESCAC, and for the Student-Unionist Nikolay
College, EASCAC. The computers are programmed
to destroy one another on provocation. Upon that
scene arrives Giles Goat-Boy, conceived by
accident by the computer WESCAC and born
mysteriously of a virgin. Rescued from automatic
destruction in the computer's tape-lift by Max
Spielman (apparently representing the Jewish side
of the Judeo-Christian heritage), Giles is raised on
the university goat farm. There, during mating
season, he makes the painful discovery that he is
not really a goat. That discovery, coupled with his
mysterious origin, leads him to believe that he is
a savior of mankind. Wearing a foul goatskin, the
sexually aroused Giles goes to the West Campus to
preach his Revised New Syllabus and prove his
right to be Grand Tutor. At once guileless and
lustful, he wanders through countless weird
adventures and extraordinary trials, rejecting
various philosophies and temptations on the way
to his ultimate goal, which is to enter the computer
WESCAC, change its programming, and thus bring
the student body (mankind) to Redemption.
The publication of Giles Goat-Boy was a major
literary event. The novel received long front-page
reviews, was distributed by two book clubs, and
became a best-seller. Its critical reception was
nevertheless rather mixed. A few complained that
the book, although inventive, lacked depth. Alfred
Alvarez remarked for the London Observer (April
2,1967): "The allegory is worked out down to the
smallest expletive.... The figures are so
rigorously symbolic that they can never be more
than puppets, and the whole development is
governed by the simple principle of exploring
obsessively every logical possibility of every
situation. . . . The result is . . . an intricate,
academic game of logic-chopping. Even the
wrought, archaic style has a pedantic ring."
Webster Schott, writing for Life (August 12,1966),
opined: "Giles Goat-Boy is the novel with
something to offend everyone. Barth distributes his
hostility and nihilism with cold impartiality. His
psychiatrists encourage sodomy. His moralists
preach immorality. His pacifists want blood.
Humanity is totally perverted. . . . The novel
deteriorates into a game of matching Barth's
inventions to their corresponding realities."
Phyllis Grosskurth, writing for the Toronto Globe
and Mail (September 3, 1966), praised the work:
"Here is a novel of dazzling synthesis, embodying
religion, myth, science, and politics, and narrated
in the most literate, controlled prose since Joyce.
BARTH
Any cavil on the part of a mere critic seems tawdry,
if not downright impertinent."
As Barth's reputation grew so did the demand
for him to give readings at universities and other
intellectual centers. He became interested in the
voice as a narrative instrument, and that interest
reinforced his intention-based on his premise
that the realistic novel had run its course-to
affirm the artificial element in his art and "make
the artifice part of [the] point." He began
composing pieces specifically for voice and tape
recorder and rendering them before his audiences.
His short pieces for tape and live voice were
included among the 14 stories, meditations, and
parodies published in Lost in the Funhouse.
"Many things can happen in John Barth's
funhouse, but getting lost is not likely to be one of
them," a reviewer for Time (September 27, 1968)
commented. "Whenever the rubber spiders and
indiscreetly aimed jets of air become too
threatening, the lights suddenly flash on and
Proprietor Barth himself ambles in and starts
explaining the machinery. Those who take their
funhouses seriously may grow confused and
exasperated. But readers of The Sot-Weed Factor
and Giles Goat-Boy are familiar with Barth's
impulses toward farce, his intellectual mobility,
shaggy doggerel, and merry nihilism. These people
are apt to accept the clever gimmickry as one
would a party favor .... Taken together, as Barth
urges they should be, these fictions interreact to
produce a series of constantly changing and
enticing illusive forms .... Another bit of Barth
cunning is to turn daily life into mythology while
turning mythology into domestic comedy."
In 1972 Barth published Chimera, a volume of
three interconnected novellas that offered
retellings of the classical stories of Perseus, who
slew Medusa; Bellerophon, who tamed the winged
horse Pegasus; and Scheherazade. The book was
the joint winner (with John Williams's Augustus)
of the 1973 National Book Award for fiction. Barth
did not publish another book of fiction until 1979,
when his novel Letters appeared. That work is
composed of seven letters, each representing a
letter in the word "letters." Three of the seven
fictional letters are authored by characters from
Barth's earlier works, two are by descendants of
characters, and one is by a character named John
Barth. The novel received mixed reviews.
Benjamin DeMott, for the Atlantic Monthly
(November 1979), suggested: "While Barth's
fascination with the technology of narrative is
often wearing, it does stimulate brooding on the
meaning, for contemporary life, of the decline of
the storytelling craft. . . . [More important than]
this is the scrupulousness with which the book's
basic theme-call it the fiction of fiction-is
explored. . . . Whether the novel as hitherto
constituted is the proper setting for such
instruction can be debated. So too can the wisdom
of promoting complex epistemological fiction in a
manner suggesting that a swell evening's reading
49
BARTH
lies ahead. . . . Yet despite all this, Letters
remains worth wrestling with. It is by turns a brain-
buster, a marathon, an exasperation, a frustration,
a provocation, to earnest thought." Paul Gray,
writing for Time (October 8, 1979), offered a
negative assessment: "Barth seems to have taken
pains to make his letter writers as unattractive as
possible .... The chief virtue of the old epistolary
novel was suspense; the tense was present, and the
letter writers did not know what would happen
once they put down their quills. Barth strips the
form of any forward thrust. His interest is not in
progress or advancement but in
recapitulation. . . . It takes a major writer to
commit a major blunder. What Barth publishes
matters, in capital Letters .... As he talks on and
on, piling analysis upon explanation, the audience
slowly files out. If Joyce's Ulysses was the
milestone of modernism, Barth's Letters may well
be its tombstone."
In Sabbatical: A Romance Susan Seckler has
decided she needs to come to a decision about her
life; either she should return to teaching or have a
child with her husband, Fenwick Turner, a former
CIA operative who has recently written a scathing
book about the intelligence agency. Married for
seven years the couple decide to take the winter off
to sail the Caribbean in their boat and reflect on
their lives. Along the way they must also confront
other issues they've been unwilling to deal with,
including the disappearance of Fenwick's brother,
who has vanished along with his partner in the
CIA, and the brutal gang rape of Susan's sister by
SA VAK, the internal-security agency for the Shah
of Iran. In a review for the Washington Post (May
23, 1982), Charles Trueheart cheered: "Although
the novel is no retrogression, stylistically or
thematically, for Barth, it does represent those
rudiments of storytelling Barth has been willing to
sacrifice of late. He attends to characters and the
illumination of their drama more scrupulously and
straightforwardly than in anything he has written
since his first pair of novels, The Floating Opera
and The End of the Road. As a consequence,
Sabbatical lodges itself firmly in our imaginations
and memories-and it is a pleasure to read
besides." For the New York Times Book Review
(June 20, 1982), Michael Wood suggested that the
novel "reads easily enough and persuasively
makes the story seem to belong to its
inhabitants. . . . But there is a flatness in the book
that these likable characters cannot redeem. Partly
this is the result of heavy-handedness that is felt
everywhere." Wood added, "The problem is not
that Barth fails to deliver grander meanings but
that he looks so hard for them, so restlessly tries to
convert a modest and engaging trip into a wind-
filled portent."
Barth published his first nonfiction work of
nonfiction, The Friday Book, in 1985. The title
refers to the author's habit of writing fiction four
days a week and devoting every Friday to such
nonfiction work as essays, lectures, or addresses.
50
The Friday Book is a collection of those works and
reveals a side of the author not previously seen in
print. Walter Kendrick, for the New York Times
Book Review (November 18,1984), observed: "Mr.
Barth's still-debatable standing in the literary
tradition will be determined by his fiction, not the
slight and sometimes scrappy pieces that make up
[this work]. They portray him in a wide variety of
moods, from the rather inflated rhapsody brought
on by his beloved Chesapeake Bay to the
painstakingly analytical approach he takes to his
favorite book of all time, The Arabian Nights. They
reveal little about his private life, but they have a
consistent tone of warm personal enthusiasm that
is often beguiling. They are not . . . the products
of his closest attention or deepest engagement.
Their value-not great, but not negligible-resides
in the light they cast on the work to which Mr.
Barth devotes the other four-fifths of his week."
John R. Dunlap remarked in America (April 13,
1985): "If it is true that children are the toughest
critics (because they stop reading whatever bores
them), John Barth tends to make me, well,
childlike. And since I did not expect much, I
cannot say his first collection of nonfiction is a
disappointment-although the duty of reading The
Friday Book cover-to-cover was a tad painful. In
most of his work, Barth seems to address an
audience of flummoxed English professors like
himself, of the hapless students of these English
professors, and of with-it critics prone to the turgid
('Very likely, John Barth is the most brilliant
American novelist now at work') and fascinated by
the infantile."
Barth returned to two of his favorite themes-
storytelling and the sea-with his next novel, The
Tidewater Tales (1987). In it, the minimalist
novelist Peter Sagamore and his wife, Katherine,
have decided to take a two-week boat trip around
Chesapeake Bay. In their boat, named Story, they
tell each other stories and try to come to terms with
some of their problems. Peter has been self-editing
his writing so mercilessly that his pieces end up no
more than a few words in length; Katherine, who
has a master's degree in library science, is a
"maximalist" whose epic oral histories are the
center of her universe. Their two conflicting
ideologies, however, don't pose nearly as much of
a challenge as their debates on life. Though
Katherine is in the late terms of her pregnancy,
they question the purpose of having children,
while at the same time being comically pursued by
Katherine's father and her obstetrician. Along the
way the couple encounter a variety of modern-day
versions of literary characters, including Ulysses,
Don Quixote, and Scheherazade. For Library
Journal (June 15, 1987), Edward B. St. John
proclaimed: "A strong addition to the Barth canon,
Tidewater Tales is probably the only piece of
experimental fiction that can double as summer
beach reading." On the other hand, Jonathan
Raban, for the Times Literary Supplement (August
19-25, 1988), was far more critical: "For a book

which promises to be bottomless ... The
Tidewater Tales, in parts at least, is
disconcertingly shallow and banal. ... It is an
exasperating book. It is hugely self-indulgent (with
Barth working the titles of his own earlier novels,
like the sot-weed factor and the floating opera, into
the text in hide-and-seek lower case) .... [But]
The Tidewater Tales seems mysteriously to
improve after one's finished reading it. In
retrospect, you can wander around the text, taking
in its bizarre juxtapositions and narrative tricks at
a glance."
Maintaining the sailing theme Barth published
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991).
While taking a cruise that traced the voyages of
Sinbad the Sailor, the popular journalist Simon
Behler finds himself washed overboard and
rescued by contemporaries of the real Sinbad.
Tossed back in time, Simon struggles to come to
terms with his new situation by regaling his fellow
sailors with tales of his adventures living as a boy
in Maryland, falling in love, and gaining early
success as a writer. Critics offered slight praise for
the novel. "Though I have been interested in, or
entertained by, many passages in [Barth's] work,
have marveled at others, and have been bored or
exasperated by still more, I have never been moved
by his fiction, or been captured by it for a moment,"
Robert Towers wrote for the New York Review of
Books (April 25, 1991). "He seems unable to give
his characters a deeply grounded or significant
inner life." Jonathan Raban, for the New York
Times Book Review (February 3,1991), noted: "On
any page, you can find at least one act of verbal
contortionism to applaud. Yet the overall effect
after several hundred pages is jocose, long-winded
and arbitrary .... Behler's wartime boyhood is
the one true novelty in the book, and it makes his
adventures in the world and style of [Sir Richard]
Burton seem pallid by comparison."
With Once upon a Time (1994), Barth again
mined the theme of sailing as a representation of
his characters' journeys through life, though this
time the protagonist was based on Barth himself.
Presented as a novel in the form of a memoir, Once
upon a Time describes a middle-aged writer and
his wife sailing into a time warp, known as the
"Chesapeake Triangle," where they recall his
development as a writer, with a particular
emphasis on his early novels. The book received
mostly favorable reviews. R. H. W. Dillard, for the
New York Times Book Review (Iuly 3, 1994), noted:
"[This work] is an appropriately complicated
texture of riffs and motifs, reflexive images and
echoes from [the author's] other books. But while
it tinkers with time and flouts the very possibility
of order with the inventive comic skills of one of
Mr. Barth's favorite authors, Laurence Sterne, it
manages at the same time to impose a symmetrical
order every bit as contrived and pleasing as any of
those of another of his 18th-century favorites,
Henry Fielding. Once Upon a Time is, then, its
own complex complete self, but it is also the
BARTH
satisfying last chapter and tying up of a much
larger 12-volume work, the remarkable and
altogether noteworthy opera and virtual voyages of
John Barth." Wilfrid Mellers wrote for the Times
Literary Supplement (November 25, 1994): "The
story of Once Upon a Time enacts the basic myth
of the eternal return, involving a quest and a
perilous journey: from a mysterious birth,
initiation, exile, confrontation with demons of
sundry sorts, to a return by way of death and
transfiguration. Such patterns of behaviour were
outlined by key writers of the 1960s, such as
Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye and Marshall
McLuhan, all of whom play vicarious roles in this
book. But it is not an anthropological, let alone a
theological, tract, and what matters is the identity
it achieves between the present reality of narration
and its putative, sometimes contradictory
meanings. . . . Barth started the book in the year
devoted to the (sometimes denunciatory)
celebration of Columbus's discovery of the New
World; and he has produced a 'memoir' which re-
creates not only himself, but also a world."
The plot of Coming Soon!!! centers around a
competition between an aging novelist, known as
Novelist Emeritus (N. E.), and his protege, Johns
Hopkins Johnson, known as Aspiring Novelist (A.
N.). Believing the print novel to be dead, A. N.
argues that cyberspace can create a better
storytelling medium through hypertext. A wager is
made: the older author begins to write a new print
novel while the student begins work on a hypertext
version, each racing the other to see who finishes
first. Their combined work is presented in Coming
Soon!!!, which contains representations of a Web
site, clickable icons, and underlined hypertext
links. For the London Guardian (March 20, 2002,
on-line), Sarah Churchwell called Barth's latest "a
meditation on the fear of endings and the
simultaneous drive towards them, confronting and
mocking Barth's fears about the death of the novel;
the end of his 'potency', both artistic and sexual;
the end of his career; and the end of his life. . . .
At his finest Barth balances his sportive self-
consciousness with a lyrical recognition of our
unconscious desires and fears. His virtuosic
brilliance remains, but the barrages of jokes about
laughing in the face of death in Coming Soon!!!
ultimately seem as frantic-and unconvincing-as
all those exclamation marks." Steven More for the
Washington Post Book World (November 25,2001)
proclaimed: "Barth is back in full metafictional
finery, sporting all the bells and whistles of
postrnodernism like boutonnieres, the three
exclamation points in the title announcing that he
intends to go out with a bang. For he implies this
might be his last novel, and while that is grievous
news to those of us who consider him one of the
greatest novelists of our time, it is bracing to have
this final display of his matchless power."
With Where Three Roads Meet (2005), Barth
returned to the intersecting novella form used for
Chimera. The title {sometimes rendered as Where
51
BARUTH
3 Roads Meet) is both a reference to the place
where Oedipus unknowingly killed his father in
Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus Rex and a future
novella collection of a character in the first of the
book's three novellas, "Tell Me"-only one
example of the book's seemingly countless
metafictional twists. Brent Bowles, for the
Virginian-Pilot (December 18, 2005), wrote that the
book's "delighting puzzle . . . is how Barth
manages to celebrate and parody the beauty and
variability of language. He merrily lampoons
writers who have retold the same story in guises
both pedantic and esoteric." Barth's interest in
language, Bowles argued, means that the book
"will demand a greater focus and determination
than do most contemporary novels. Barth does not
stop for stragglers. But the trip to this narrative
confluence, however taxing, is a trek worth its
weight in words." On the other hand, Deborah
Friedell, writing for the New York Times
(December 25, 2005), found the book stale:
"Indeed, those who have read even a small amount
of Barth's previous outpourings will recognize
little that is innovative in these three novellas
(which one character defines as stories that are 'too
long to sell to a magazine and too short to sell to
a book publisher'). The settings and themes are
familiar Barth territory: Greek myth, the
university, the central metaphor of sperm bravely
heading toward ovum." Though she found "much
here to admire" in Barth's intelligent language and
humor, Friedell remarked that "his self-indulgence
becomes overweening, with sentences glutted with
bad puns, French bons mots and self-references.
The prose often seems in love with its own
sophistication, a bit of a bully."
In addition to the works cited above, Barth is the
author of another collection of nonfiction, Further
Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction,
1984-1994 (1997), and two additional collections
of short fiction, On with the Story (1996) and The
Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004). Barth has
also been an influential teacher, beginning his
career at Pennsylvania State University, in State
College, from 1953 to 1965, before becoming a
professor of English at the State University of New
York, in Buffalo, from 1965 to 1973. In 1973 he
returned to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins
University, to teach creative writing, and 19 years
later the university made him an emeritus
professor; he only retired completely from
teaching in 1995. In 1998 he received a lifetime
achievement award from the Lannan Foundation.
John Barth and Harriette Anne Strickland were
married on January 11, 1950. They had three
children-Christine, John, and Daniel-before
divorcing, in 1969. Barth married Shelly I.
Rosenberg on December 27, 1970. After years of
living in Baltimore, he and Shelly now split their
time between Chestertown, Maryland, and Bonita
Springs, Florida.
-C.M.
52
Suggested Reading: America p309 Apr. 13, 1985;
Atlantic Monthly p89 Nov. 1979; Chicago
Tribune Tempo pl Jan. 2, 2006; Horizon p36+
Jan. 1963; Library Journal p82 June 15, 1987; Life
p8 Oct. 18, 1968; (London) Guardian (online)
Mar. 10,2002; New York Review of Books p46
Apr. 25, 1991; New York Times Book Review p22
Aug. 7, 1966, pl June 20, 1982, p16 Nov. 18,
1984, p3 Feb. 3, 1991, p13 July 3, 1994, p15 Dec.
25, 2005; Time p109 Mar. 17, 1967, Oct. 8, 1979;
Times Literary Supplement p901 Aug. 19-25,
1988, p21 Nov. 25, 1994; Virginian-Pilot E p3
Dec. 18, 2005; Washington Post Book World p1
May 23, 1982, p6 Nov. 25, 2001; Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature p3+ Winter-
Spring 1965
Selected Books: fiction-The Floating Opera,
1956; The End of the Road, 1958; The Sot-Weed
Factor, 1960; Giles Goat-Boy, 1966; Lost in the
Funhouse, 1968; Chimera, 1972; Letters; 1979,
Sabbatical: A Romance, 1982; The Tidewater
Tales, 1987; Floating Opera and the End of the
Road, 1988; The Last Voyage of Somebody the
Sailor, 1991; Once upon a Time, 1994; On with
the Story, 1996; Coming Soon!!!, 2001; The Book
of Ten Nights and a Night, 2004; Where Three
Roads Meet, 2005; nonfiction-The Friday Book,
1985; Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and
Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994, 1997
Baruth, Philip E.
1962 (?)- Novelist; radio commentator
Philip E. Baruth is best known for his novel The X
President (2003), a mixture of political satire and
science-fiction audacity; in the year 2055, a time
when the U.S. is reeling from home-grown
terrorism and facing an imminent invasion from
hostile foreign nations, a government plot is
hatched to send a few select operatives back in
time to prevent a former president, who served in
the 1990s and is identified only as BC, from
making certain decisions that set America on its
current ill-fated course. (In interviews Baruth has
conceded that BC is modeled on President Bill
Clinton.) Baruth, a professor of English at the
University of Vermont, in Burlington, is also a
regular contributor to Vermont Public Radio.
Philip Edward Baruth was born in about 1962.
He graduated from Brown University, in
Providence, Rhode Island, with a bachelor's
degree, in 1984, and continued his studies at the
University of California, at Irvine, receiving his
Ph.D. in English, in 1993. Baruth was subsequently
appointed to the faculty of the University of
Vermont, where he remains. His academic
research deals primarily with Restoration and
18th-century drama as well as autobiography;