Barth gets heart of The Story

Traver Kauffman, Special to the News

Published December 2, 2005 at midnight

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With Where 3 Roads Meet, the venerable John Barth - author of Lost in the Funhouse, The Sot-Weed Factor and, most recently, the 9/11-haunted The Book of Ten Nights and a Night - offers a generally rewarding trio of loosely connected novellas with a postmodern bent and a preoccupation with the Heroic Cycle.

Here, as in most of Barth's work, the author is concerned as much with how a tale is told as the tale itself, resulting in an almost bottomless metafictional plumbing that can baffle or alienate the unsuspecting reader. However, on the whole, Barth's generosity and comedic gifts buoy Where 3 Roads Meet, keeping his exploration into myths and the muses from sinking into the murky depths of formal experiment.

The first novella, "Tell Me," is the story of the Three Freds - Wilfred, Alfred and Winifred - friends "in mid-twentieth-century USA . . . in the mid-Atlantic-coast state of Maryland" who fall into a love triangle.

Of course, there's little point in putting one's characters into such a situation unless complications ensue, and, indeed, the happy arrangement of the Three Freds falls apart in dramatic fashion, as the reader will discover.

Sexual betrayal and love-gone-wrong are well-worn narrative hobbyhorses, so Barth isn't breaking much new ground there.But he's after more than just the accumulation of pedestrian plot points; this novella, like the balance of Where 3 Roads Meet, is a story about storytelling - a fact that Barth explicitly announces in a characteristically kinetic passage about his character Will Chase's desire to tell the story of himself and the other two Freds.

Here, the author details how an event has shocked aspiring author Will "into speech - anyhow into a redoubled conviction of his calling, whether or not he proved capable of adequate response: an impassioned resolve to tell, not only . . . the Three Freds Story (trifles in themselves, and yet, and yet . . .), but also, though he could not then have put it into these words, the story of these stories. Maybe even somehow . . . the capital-S Story's story, whatever that might be."

After enduring the crucible of "Tell Me," readers will have had a heaping helping of Barth's narrative playfulness, and thus should have decided whether or not they have the patience to continue. Even so, the middle novella, "I've Been Told: A Story's Story", might sorely test that patience.

As advertised, this novella is the story of the Story. That is, the narrator is the eternal and endless Whole Story that has been and always will be told, that archetypal tale where a hero of "Unusual Conception" answers the "Summons to Adventure," ready to meet "Obstacles and Adversaries." Etc.

In this telling of how the telling is told, the Story - for reasons not immediately clear - calls himself Old Fart Fred and goes off to meet the Teller and the Mere Reader. What ensues is a sort of wacky take on Pilgrim's Progress - a thickly allegorical and philosophical look into the nature of storytelling and how the Story, Teller and Reader meet to bear it ever forward.

Barth tries valiantly to keep things light, peppering an often knotty discussion with goofy puns and other jokes, and for the most part his intellectual points are well-taken. Still, wading through "I've Been Told" reminds me of a criticism directed at the writing of author/editor Gordon Lish; that is, that the writing here is akin to a clock missing its clock face, with all the grinding, gummy works on display. This can be fascinating in small doses, but it can also make you long for an author who keeps his gears to himself and just gives you the time.

Happily, Barth again cleaves to character in the last and best of the novellas, "As I Was Saying . . ." A triumvirate of characters, in fact: three muses/sisters - and former prostitutes - who are recording a bawdy, mocking oral history of their association with author Manfred Dickson, who published an infamous and epic trilogy of sexually explicit novels called The Fates and then disappeared from view in the midst of the ensuing scandal.

The object of the sisters' mockery is Dickson's son, Manfred F. Dickson Jr., branded as a humorless scholar attempting to write (of course) "a three-volume historical/critical/biographical study of Manfred Senior's life and times."

This is a nesting-doll of a novella, with stories within stories, that owes its success to Manfred Senior's muses, who make fine company as they intelligently joke their way through an account of how they're tangled up in the conception, composition and reception of the great author's trilogy.

Or are they? In the final pages, Barth pulls a Nabokov on the reader, driving home the point that there are at least as many true stories as there are tellers.

Doubtless some of Barth's many ancient allusions will sail over readers' heads, and some will find themselves a little worn out with his shameless punnery; still, no matter. The important thing is that the Heroic Cycle has sparked Barth's imagination anew, and with Where 3 Roads Meet he has reaffirmed himself as one of the best we have when it comes to getting to the heart of the story . . . and the story of the story.

Traver Kauffman runs the literary weblog Rake's Progress (rakesprogress.typepad.com). He lives in Denver.

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