Sot-Weed

[Mark Kohut]

Now I'll pile on, although I'm still nobody and who are you-- to not have fun despite me? 

After The End of the Road, which, with his first were so old-fashionedly superb  [let's say] yet also
about modernist concerns---meaning of life and living it (among other things) and more.............

After those books, and the smart clever such-fun stories in Chimera, he mighta found his next theme (announced
in one of those stories)...that the meaning of life IS stories........telling them.....Is that deep enough for our age? 

Which to me renders him.....ultimately superficial compared to such as TRP (and others)....TRP has a vision of
History, of full human beings in our hard and only life......He---as Zukovsky titled his book about Shakespeare,
touches bottom, imho.......

Barth keeps dog paddling above the bottom.....Sot--Weed and Giles are too much cheap fun; smart but mindless pleasures......I 
felt the same,
but admittedly I was surely projecting too, about Letters, which I could barely get into...........

Another perspective, since Barth has more talent in his thumb and forefinger than many writers of his time
(and that I have critical talent) , let's call him more Ben Johnson [in the book news 'cause of new bio] than 
the possible Shakespeare that is TRP....................... 

I feel bad about this post already but so it goes.....



I should probably stay out of this: why dis other peple's idea of fun? But ...

Way back when I was just getting into Pynchon, the big guys claimed Barth was the real thing, an intellectual('s) novelist, unlike Pynchon. I found Barth intriguing, challenging, often funny, but often smug and tedious. (Can anybody read Goat-Boy these days? Maybe: I admit I haven't since 1973 and don't intend to.) When M&D came out, several reviewers complained that we didn't need Pynchon's go at something Barth had done better a generation earlier. So I reread (even taught!) Sot-Weed, and was ... disappointed. How could I ever have found all those fart jokes and rape jokes amusing? I still occasionally think about possibly doing something with Letters someday, but maybe it won't reread well either.

John