Volume 38, Number 8 · April 25, 1991
Tripping the Not-So-Light Fantastic
By Robert Towers
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
by John Barth
Little, Brown, 573 pp., $22.95
John Barth is known as the procreator of sacred monsters—strange hybrid creatures endowed with attributes that display his erudition, gift for mimicry, and perversity, in almost equal proportions. These qualities are all present in his vast, tumbling 'historical' novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, with its evocations of Defoe and Smollett; the travesties and reinventions of myth and fable in Chimera and, recently, The Tidewater Tales; and particularly his two mythopoeic extravaganzas, Giles Goat-boy and LETTERS, the later replete with cerebral puzzles, anagrams, and symbolic cross-references. Except for Chimera, these books are gigantic in size and for long stretches make what an unsympathetic reader might consider inordinate demands upon his or her attention. Collectively, they have gained for Barth his reputation—particularly within the shrinking circle of academics drawn to postmodernist writing—as one of America's supreme 'metafictionists,' rivaled only by Thomas Pynchon and followed at a short distance by that inspired comedian Robert Coover.
Review, 2374 words
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