THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406010450
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: C2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER
DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: Medium
JOHN BARTH
{REST} Little, Brown. 398 pp. $23.95.
\ \ JOHN BARTH has blended artful plot twists with deft wordplay to create a collection of high-spirited, fast-paced novels (The Floating Opera, The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera). But in Once Upon a Time, experimentation crowds out entertainment.
The novel, like so many of his others, revolves around a boating trip. The main character, supposedly Barth, and his companion, supposedly his wife, set out on a cruise on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, where Barth really lives.
So this is supposed to be an autobiographical novel. Or is it? Barth keeps the reader guessing. Characters merge into one another: His foul-mouthed boyhood friend Jerry Schreiber becomes the professorial Jay Wordsworth Scribner. And we never find out much about his real-life wife.
Barth is playing with conventions and expectations here. Symbols and metaphors, a novelist's stock in trade, get mocked, too, as when Barth gives his friend his watch to signal his retreat into memory and the start of his life story.
This all could have been fun. But Barth's insistence on setting off on tangents (his challenge, of course, to straightforward narrative) brings the novel down.
There is, for instance, a multi-page mini-treatise on his attachment to pens and an inventory of the types he's used for his books. Later, there are 10 mind-numbing pages dissecting the meaning of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme (because his sister, at least in Once Upon a Time, is named Jill).
Listen to part of it: ``A cultural reflex of male primacy? Very likely. Reflective of a customary male initiative in such enterprises as hill-ascending, water-fetching, etc.? Likewise likely - though Jill's relegation to the end of the line may be owing to nothing more invidious than the resources of English rhyme. Jill and Jack/Went up the track? Out the back? Down the crack? Unpromising openers. It may well be the hill that constrains Jill to her secondary position and Jack, a fortiori, to his primary. . . .''
On and on it goes. Barth is clearly sending up the heavy-handed prose of academics, but parody or not, it's nearly impossible to read.
He also lets his playfulness with language get out of control. For instance: ``Beloved Reality Principle, sine qua non and osprey-keen, who sniffeth the Fishy instanter from yea far: It's out of character I'm acting, for that I fain would sneak my Pumblechook Parker aboard US, antiprudently and huggermugger. Don't ask.'' Don't worry; nobody would.
Once Upon a Time almost reinforces the value of traditional story-telling. Barth is at his best when he gets back on track with his so-called life story, such as his fight with the teenage Schreiber/ Scribner over his sister's honor. And the language at those points also regains its vigor:
``But my prepubescent adrenals did their fifth-grade-schoolyard job; tear-blinded, I flew at my insulter/ attacker friend, and, evidently overwhelmed him with a mindless hurricane of fist-flails, a tsunami of outraged/enraged grapple-pushes.''
Maybe Barth should stick to more conventional ``once upon a time'' tales. by CNB