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justforbooks · 9 months ago

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The American novelist John Barth, who has died aged 93, was a noted evangelist for experimental fiction, beguiling his readers with complex stories within stories.

He claimed as his patron saint Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the vizier’s daughter whose tales, spun out for 1,001 nights, entranced King Shahryar: “The whole frame of these thousand nights and a night,” Barth said, “speaks to my heart, directly and intimately – and in many ways at once personal and technical.”

He came to notice with his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a riotous mock-epic pastiche that drew upon a satire of American manners of the same title published in 1708 by one Ebenezer Cooke.

Reviewers compared the book to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and enjoyed Barth’s rollicking use of coincidence, parody, farce, sentimentality and melodrama. It was much-hyped – “One of the greatest works of fiction of our time,” said the writer and artist Richard Kostelanetz – but Gore Vidal found Barth’s humour to be laboured: “I could not so much as summon up a smile at the lazy jokes and the horrendous pastiche of what Barth takes to be 18th-century English.” Other critics complained of its excessive length, narrow emotional range and an underlying facetiousness in Barth’s tone.

His next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), brought Barth critical and commercial success. It was a mythology drenched campus novel, complete with cold war allegories and self-reflexive narratives, 766 pages long. Barth’s penchant for addressing political, religious and philosophical issues gave his novel a flavour of seriousness that was widely praised. Vidal, however, called it “a book to be taught rather than read”.

The following year, Barth published The Literature of Exhaustion, a manifesto for literary postmodernism, in the Atlantic magazine. The traditional forms of representation were used up, he argued. There were too many contemporary writers who went about their business as though James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov had never written. Barth’s impatience with most fiction and his eloquent enthusiasm for the experimental caught a moment in contemporary culture. He became the poster boy for postmodernism.

One of the three children of Georgia (nee Simmons) and John Barth, who ran a sweet shop, he was born in Cambridge, a small crab and oyster town in Maryland, and grew up amid the flat, low-lying tidal marshlands on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

His twin sister was whimsically named Jill, and Barth’s family knew him as Jack, a source of teasing during their schooldays.

After graduating from high school, Barth enrolled in a summer programme at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. An enthusiastic jazz drummer, he hoped for a career as an arranger, but at the Juilliard he encountered some seriously talented performers and his ambitions shrank.

Instead, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, to study journalism. He remained at Hopkins to complete a master’s degree, and in 1953 landed a job in the English department at Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for 12 years.

Barth’s first published novel, The Floating Opera (1956), was a traditional first-person narrative about boozing, desire and nihilism on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. The End of the Road (1958), described by the critic Leslie Fiedler as an example of “provincial American existentialism”, was a darker novel about a grad-school dropout, ending with an abortion. Some of the more gruesome details were cut at the insistence of his publishers, but restored when the novel was later reissued.

In 1965 he took a job teaching at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, where he remained until 1973. During that time of student unrest, the campus was repeatedly occupied by local police and troopers of the National Guard. Barth was less sympathetic to the protesters than some of his colleagues, but he wholeheartedly threw himself into the trashing of the practitioners of “traditional” fiction such as John Updike and William Styron, whose work he felt was a literary dead end.

Under the growing influence of Borges and 60s counterculture, Barth turned away from fat pastiche-novels to short fictional forms. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) was a melange of short fictions for print, tape and live voice, which he staged on campuses across the nation. In 1973 he returned to Johns Hopkins to take up a chair of creative writing, and stayed until retirement in 1992.

By the 80s, the frisky, postmodern self-consciousness that had made readers sit up in the 60s had lost some of its capacity to shock. It had gone, within a generation, from being a great cause to a routine, a shtick. Barth’s books increasingly needed to be explained to readers, and sales fell away. Complex, self-referential novels such as Chimera, which shared the National Book Award in 1973, the epistolary Letters (1979) and Sabbatical (1982) were seen as working out the implications of The Literature of Exhaustion.

In 1980 he revisited this essay with The Literature of Replenishment, in which he repented his youthful scorn for the 19th-century novel as practised by the “great premodernists” such as Dickens, Twain and Tolstoy. If, as the modernists asserted, linearity, rationality and consciousness are not the whole story, argued Barth, “we may appreciate that the contraries of those things are not the whole story either … A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis … of these modes of writing.”

Barth’s essays were collected in three volumes as The Friday Book (1984), Further Fridays (1995) and Final Fridays (2012). A further collection of short nonfiction pieces, Postscripts, was published in 2022. Once Upon a Time (1994), with its teasing promise of tall tales, was his most autobiographical novel. Coming Soon!!! (2001), with its references to The Floating Opera, showed that the old postmodernist playfulness was unquenched.

In 1998, Barth won both the Lannan Foundation’s lifetime achievement award and the Pen/Malamud award for excellence in the short story.

He married Anne Strickland in 1950 and they had three children, Christine, John and Daniel. The couple divorced in 1969 and the following year he married Shelly Rosenberg. She and his children survive him.

🔔 John Simmons Barth, writer, born 27 May 1930; died 2 April 2024

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turtlethebean · 1 year ago

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Carchelle Week Day 5: Work

Also available on AO3: No Feelings at Work - Turtle_The_Bean - Criminal Case (Video Game) [Archive of Our Own]

All Carmen Martinez knew was work. That was how she spent most of her adult life. For more than fifteen years, her work was documenting a war in Yemen, which ultimately resulted in the takedown of a terrorist network. She won an award for that.

But after she won that award, journalism, which had been her passion for years, became mind-numbingly boring. She still loved her job, but there was no longer the thrill of watching what was unfolding in Yemen. Reports of what local billionaires were doing and whatever crime was happening in Baltimore paled in comparison to the things she witnessed back then. She needed something more.

So, when the Bureau offered her a job, she obviously accepted it. She needed more adventure in her life. After all, she was slowly but surely reaching an age where she would be too old and tired to cover stories like the ones she did previously.

Carmen set one rule in place when she started working: no feelings at work. Everything had to be covered with complete neutrality, unphased by her own opinions of what was happening. She didn’t allow herself to mourn the sheer number of lives lost in the war; it would take up too much of her time, and she feared some maternal instincts deciding to kick in randomly.

But most importantly, she wasn’t going to date anyone who had ties with her work. She wasn’t going to date any coworkers or any people she interviewed. She was going to keep her love life and her work life separate. She figured it would be better off that way. Romance at work could cause drama and rumours to spread like wildfire, and she wasn’t going to be a spark to ignite a controversy. She saw how the news handled lesbian relationships, making her more desperate to keep her love life away from her work.

And now, she was sitting in the breakroom, wondering where she went wrong in that rule. She wondered when and why her mind had suddenly started to betray what she thought was a reasonable rule. Besides getting into a few fistfights in her younger years, she was never a rulebreaker, and yet she was starting to break a rule she had set in place to protect herself.

She tried to put her attention back on herself. Her staring probably made her look angry, and she couldn’t deny the fact that she had a resting bitch face. She really wasn’t angry at her, despite being accused of being the mole. If anything, she had admiration for this other woman. Not only was she exceptionally pretty (in Carmen’s eyes, at least), but she was smart enough to solve the Bureau’s little mole problem.

Maybe she was mistaking gratitude for love? No, Jonah had saved her life before, and she never felt this way towards him.

She wasn’t even that close to her. In fact, she had just spent the past few weeks not trusting her at all, especially after her response to Elliot’s kidnapping. So why was she now getting these feelings? Were they bottled up while she was busy trying to figure out the mole’s identity, just like everyone else?

“Why are you aggressively staring at Michelle?” Carmen snapped out of her thoughts to hear Jonah beside her. She didn’t even know he was in the room with her.

“Jee- Jonah, don’t sneak up on me like that. Also, my staring was not that aggressive.” She started, feeling her heart rate slow down a bit after that fright.

“Whatever you say. Anyways, what’s up with you and staring at her? Do you not trust her?”

“I trust her,” Carmen poured herself another cup of coffee, “It’s just…I don’t know. I really don’t know how to feel about her.”

“Hmm…do you find yourself daydreaming about her?”

“I mean…” She remembered all the thoughts that had been flooding her brain recently, including ones she would rather not talk about with Jonah, “Yeah, I totally have.”

“Sounds like the first stage of love, infatuation to me.” Jonah winked and nudged his friend playfully.

“You’ve been reading Marina’s psychology books again, haven’t you?”

“Well, it’s the only thing in her room besides her, and apparently, me staring at her while she’s giving therapy to someone makes people uncomfortable. So, I kinda gotta look at something that’s not her.”

“Yeah, I’d say someone staring at you, especially a big guy like yourself, staring at you while you’re trying to relive the darkest moments of your life is a little bit awkward.”

Carmen took a minute while Jonah was making himself and Marina some tea. Was her crush on Michelle really that obvious? Why didn’t anyone tell her until now? How often was she caught staring at her? How many times did people believe she was angry at her?

The questions flooded her mind and made the rest of her freeze up. She really didn’t want anyone to have the wrong impression of her thoughts and feelings towards Michelle, but people had probably already assumed that she was angry or just straight-up despised her.

Either way, she needed to make things right between them and set the record straight. She needed to let everyone know that she did not hate Michelle, nor was she holding any grudges against her.

“Michelle,” Carmen approached the other woman in the breakroom, “Can you meet me in my office later? There’s something I want to discuss with you.”

“Alright, what time should I meet you there?” Michelle replied, her tone as professional as ever.

“I’d say around four o’clock would be alright.”

“Okay then, I’ll see you later.” Michelle smiled and grabbed her items from the table before leaving.

There, now Carmen could make sure that everyone knew that she did not hate Michelle whatsoever. She proudly walked back over to Jonah and took a long sip of her coffee.

“Did you mean to use your ‘meet me in the parking lot’ voice?” He asked, making her almost spit out her coffee.

“Did I actually use that kind of voice?” Great, now she was embarrassed even more.

“Yeah…it did not look good.”

“Shit, and after all the effort I went through to make it seem like I didn’t hate her. Screw it, guess I’ll just have to explain everything to her tonight.”

“Good luck with that one.” Jonah took a sip of his tea and left to find his girlfriend, leaving his embarrassed friend standing in the breakroom, contemplating her life choices.

---

Carmen was absolutely panicking now. Why did she have to choose her office to confess her feelings? Sure, it was one way to ensure almost absolute privacy, but at the same time, she told herself not to mix her feelings with work.

Trying to calm herself down, she turned to typing away at her keyboard, focused on writing her report about their last case in Africa. However, in her flurry of trying to focus while getting increasingly frustrated with herself, she knocked her coffee mug, spilling it all over her computer, causing it to malfunction and letting out the worst high-pitched noise she could imagine. She launched the computer at the wall, trying to get it to stop making that horrid noise, and once it eventually stopped, she slouched in her chair in exhaustion.

A knock at the door suddenly caught her attention and made her pretend that she wasn’t just freaking out like crazy. “Come in.”

“I heard a lot of crashing noises. Is now a bad time?” Michelle asked, opening the door to Carmen’s office. 4 o’clock already? Carmen must’ve lost track of time in her work.

“No, not at all. Come in and sit down…but close the door behind you, please.”

Michelle closed the door behind her. Carmen wished she could ask her to lock it to ensure nobody would walk in on them, but she didn’t want to make herself seem any more suspicious than she already was.

“So, what did you call me in here for?” Michelle smiled, making the other detective’s heart leap in a way she never thought possible.

“Oh, um, well, I just wanted to set the record straight between us,” Carmen explained. How was she doing this? Why was she doing this?

“What is there to set straight?”

“Well, I figured people probably think I’m angry at you or that I hate you, but that’s really not the situation at all.”

“I understand. You do tend to look a little angry when you’re looking at me, or at least when I catch you looking at me.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I’ve been told I have a resting bitch face,” Carmen chuckled, “But I don’t hate you. In fact, it’s the opposite.”

Michelle cocked her head to the side in curiosity, “And what would you mean by that?”

“Erm, well, it’s kind of embarrassing,” now was her chance, “But I think I have feelings towards you…romantic feelings.”

“Oh, thank goodness!”

“Huh?”

“I was worried the feelings weren’t mutual, which is why I never spoke to you about them, but I’m glad you feel the same way about me.”

Carmen smiled. She never knew that mixing her feelings with her work could feel so…relieving. She wished she could savour the feeling forever, but the news was out.

Instead, she settled for something she could savour for a bit longer. She pulled Michelle closer to her and pressed her lips against hers. The two melted into a kiss that lasted until they both heard another knock at the door. They both jolted around to see Elliot Clayton, the Bureau’s tech expert, standing there with a toolbox.

“I came to fix Carmen’s computer because I heard it making the sound of death, but I guess I’ll do that later.” He said, dropping the toolbox at the door before walking away.

“Well…at least he knows I don’t hate you.” Carmen joked, trying to lighten the atmosphere a little bit.

“Yep, because making out in an office is just what your average coworkers do.” Michelle laughed, pushing the other woman away playfully before being pulled back into the kiss, where they stayed for a little while longer.

#criminal case #criminal case save the world #criminal case season 3 #carchelle week 2023 #ao3 #ao3 writer #ao3 fanfic #archive of our own

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