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I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as ...

Bow. Wow

James Wolcott: Gore Vidal, 3 February 2000

Gore Vidal 
by Fred Kaplan.
Bloomsbury, 850 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 7475 4671 1
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... or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”’ ‘Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were ...

I’ll be back

Marjorie Garber: Sequels, 19 August 1999

Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel 
edited by Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg.
Toronto, 217 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 8020 0915 8
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... with attention to authors from Homer, Chaucer and Charlotte Yonge to Donald Barthelme and John Barth. A number of the contributors focus on 18th-century fiction, others on 20th-century film, two places where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-fulfilling prophecy in The ...

Stifled Truth

Wyatt Mason: Tobias Wolff and fictions of the self, 5 February 2004

Old School 
by Tobias Wolff.
Bloomsbury, 195 pp., £12.99, February 2004, 0 7475 6948 7
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... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster ...

Be a lamp unto yourself

John Lanchester, 5 May 1988

S.: A Novel 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 244 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 233 98255 8
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... Is it possible for a novelist to write too well? This has sometimes seemed to be the case with John Updike, whose ability to evoke physical detail is unmatched. It is a virtue in accordance with his expressedly realist aesthetic. ‘My own style seemed to be a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena, and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is what it wasn’t – other-indulgent, rather ...

Hoogah-Boogah

James Wolcott: Rick Moody, 19 September 2002

The Black Veil 
by Rick Moody.
Faber, 323 pp., £16.99, August 2002, 0 571 20056 7
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... Permit a personal note. I pride myself on being a professional. I’ve reviewed epic borers by John Barth and Harold Brodkey that would have broken the spirit of Cochise. Here I nearly met my match. It took every ounce of fading willpower to get through word-choked pages in The Black Veil that seemed to stare back, defying anyone to finish ...

Separation Anxiety

David Hollinger: God and Politics, 24 January 2008

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West 
by Mark Lilla.
Knopf, 334 pp., $26, September 2007, 978 1 4000 4367 5
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... of 1917 and 1933. Lilla’s narrative of German Protestant thought from Schleiermacher to Karl Barth is sound, as far as it goes. He understands that, for Schleiermacher, religion was ‘neither a kind of thinking nor a mode of practical activity’, but ‘pure intuition and feeling’. This emphasis meant the pushing aside of scripture, the historical ...

Where Does He Come From?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Placing V.S. Naipaul, 1 November 2007

A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling 
by V.S. Naipaul.
Picador, 193 pp., £16.99, September 2007, 978 0 330 48524 1
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... post-Svevo, post-Musil narrative, the ‘literature of exhaustion’ once celebrated by John Barth, can and should be flushed down the ‘latrine’ (one of Naipaul’s favourite words). Naipaul then sets his ideal against his imagined enemy: what he terms ‘the self-serving “writing schools” of the United States and England’. He ...

Last in the Funhouse

Patrick Parrinder, 17 April 1986

Gerald’s Party 
by Robert Coover.
Heinemann, 316 pp., £10.95, April 1986, 0 434 14290 5
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Caracole 
by Edmund White.
Picador, 342 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 330 29291 9
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Lake Wobegon Days 
by Garrison Keillor.
Faber, 337 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 571 13846 2
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In Country 
by Bobbie Ann Mason.
Chatto, 245 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 7011 3034 2
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... two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual. The funhouse ...

Well, duh

Dale Peck, 18 July 1996

Infinite Jest 
by David Foster Wallace.
Little, Brown, 1079 pp., £17.99, July 1996, 0 316 92004 5
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... for his efforts to undermine traditional narrative tyranny with humour rather than resorting to a Barth-style hatchet job, all four of his novels offer the same one-dimensional commentary on contemporary US society, and, in the end, a thirty-year writing career hasn’t produced a single memorable or even recognisably human character.Pynchon does have his ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation ...

Bastard Gaelic Man

Colin Kidd, 14 November 1996

The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson 
edited by Vincenzo Merolle.
Pickering & Chatto, 257 pp., £135, October 1995, 1 85196 140 2
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... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...

Dr Küng’s Fiasco

Alasdair MacIntyre, 5 February 1981

Does God exist? 
by Hans Küng, translated by Edward Quinn.
Collins, 839 pp., £12, November 1980, 0 00 215147 2
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... with Dr Küng is a little like chiding the Third International for not adopting the principles of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic – did not respond to Dr Küng’s ...

Southern Discomfort

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 8 June 1995

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism 
by Eugene Genovese.
Harvard, 138 pp., £17.95, October 1994, 0 674 82527 6
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... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their ...

With Slip and Slapdash

Frank Kermode: Auden’s Prose, 7 February 2008

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Vol. III: Prose, 1949-55 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 779 pp., £29.95, December 2007, 978 0 691 13326 3
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... in the opening chorus of The Dog beneath the Skin. These poems belong to a time when Auden was, as John Fuller puts it, ‘unafraid of magnificence’. Many years later, when he had repudiated that sort of magnificence, he discovered that he needed Collett again, and, after a successful search for a copy of The Changing Face of England, wrote ‘In Praise of ...

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