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Once Upon a Time (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Forgoing the pensive seriousness of V. S. Naipaul’s THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL, John Barth’s twelfth book overall and ninth novel, “if it is novel,” is an odd sort of autobiographical fiction, less a personal revelation than a nest of narrative boxes, a Borgesian garden of forking paths and well-manicured playing field for the author’s baroque postmodernism. Once upon a time, on Columbus Day in 1990, Barth finds himself in a Dantean dark wood, at the end of the road, having recently retired at sixty from The Johns Hopkins University.

Having just seen into print his last (or...

[The entire page is 528 words long]

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