John Barth and our 20th century

With the death of the novelist John Barth, the 20th century—the century in which I spent the bulk of my life—experienced one of its numerous belated endings.  

In his review of Barth’s “Giles Goat Boy,” written way back in 1966, New York Times book critic Eliot Fremont-Smith noted the book’s cold-war critiques and its allusions to Joyce, Nabokov and the Beatles, among others. And Barth’s fiction or “metafiction”—which moved, in his heyday, from a modernist bleakness to post-modern razzamatazz—was as buffeted by that century’s larger literary currents as anyone’s. John Barth was peddling prime, grade-A 20th century.

I doubt I ever enjoyed a novel as much as I did “Giles Goat Boy” upon its appearance about two-thirds of the way through that century. I read it the summer before my senior year of high school. This Bildungsroman had everything a fellow just celebrating his 17th birthday desired: adventure, sex (though some of it involving goats), a heightened sense of self-awareness, a search for identity and destiny, dazzling mental gymnastics and lots of glimpses of college life.

Over the next few years, I caught up with Barth’s earlier work. His first two novels, “The Floating Opera” and “The End of the Road,” manage to be at once short, clever, effective and immersed in an existential despair. They stand up.

His third novel, “The Sot-Weed Factor,” while full of wit and self-awareness, is harder to connect with the 20th century—perhaps because it is set at the end of the 17th. But it’s great fun. “Giles Goat Boy” was Barth’s fourth novel. I ended up doing my honor’s thesis in college on John Barth.

Oddly, that was the last time I was able to get into “Giles Goat Boy.” It seemed, whenever I picked it up thereafter, too self-indulgent, too contrived, too much. Most of his later books—some of which seemed to be flailing about a bit in an attempt to be experimental; most of which were chockablock with commentary on themselves—struck me, despite the quality of Barth’s prose and the exuberance of Barth’s imagination, as ungreat, in a couple of cases almost ungood.

Maybe John Barth’s somewhat disappointing later career is a sign that 20th century schtick wore thin. I am among those who found the effort to find meaning in the meaningless enlightening. But maybe all the good meaningless meanings have been located by now, and it’s time to move on. And maybe it’s time we all exited the hall of mirrors in which Barth seemed so at home and took another look at the world outside.

I learned from “Giles Goat Boy.” We learned from modernism and postmodernism. But I’m no longer 17, and the 20th century is receding further and further into the past.