Volume 26, Number 20 · December 20, 1979
Return to Sender
By Robert Towers
Letters
by John Barth
Putnam's, 772 pp., $16.95
Sometimes a novel of a markedly eccentric character drags with it an image of its ideal reader. Letters, an immense work of perverse ingenuity, might have been designed on order for that little band of academic scholar-critics, now mostly middle-aged, who, having locked themselves into a room with Pound's Cantos and Finnegans Wake, glare balefully through barred windows at the rest of the literary scene. Occasionally they will unbolt the door just long enough to allow one of the later, lesser models to be installed—the novels of Beckett, an Ada, say, or Gravity's Rainbow. Apart from these bristling few (together with a handful of more or less coerced, more or less conscientious reviewers) it is hard to imagine what readers Letters, in its entirety, will find.
Review, 3896 words
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