Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera

The novelist presents a fictionalized account of his life, staged as an operatic cruise through memory, desire, vocation, and that life's adventures, despairs, loves, marriages, selves, and counterselves

The author's latest "excursion through time's funhouse" is an enjoyable rumination which takes the form of a three-act opera, complete with two entr'actes and numerous "arias" and recitatives. It even opens with a "Program Note," which describes the book as "a memoir bottled in a novel." Indeed, its protagonist is a 60-ish writer of fiction named John Barth, author of such playfully imaginative novels as Giles Goat-Boy and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor . He and his wife take a Columbus quincentenary sail on Chesapeake Bay, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes, where they get lost. Later, when Barth takes the dinghy to look for a passage back to open water, he finds instead what he trepidatiously recognizes to be "a threshold"--the spot, in Joseph Campbell and Lord Raglan's schematic analysis of hero myths, where the hero begins his wandering. In the metaphysical zone he now enters, Barth encounters his estranged twin sister and his longtime friend and "counterself" Jerome Schreiber, who lead him on an extended literary version of "This Is Your Life." Barth's engaging scheme allows him to "revisit" his other novels--a theme he explored so well in Letters . His writing, as always dense with ideas and wordplay, is a joy to read. There is nothing simple or single-minded about Barth's vision, however, and casting himself in a redefined hero-role is just one aspect of this book. One curious detail is its subtitle: In Barth's first novel, The Floating Opera , the nihilist protagonist pours his life into an aquatic opera house, which, in the end, he attempts to blow up. What Once Upon a Time suggests is that the process of memoirization can be not only an act of self-preservation, but also one of self-destruction.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a reprise of old themes, haunts, and ideas, metafiction master Barth (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, 1991) returns to himself and his native Chesapeake Bay in this fictional memoir of a middle-aged writer embarked on an autumnal cruise. The story is told in the Barthian way, within a frame of another story--in this case, the voyage of the writer's sloop, US, south into the ``Chesapeake Triangle'' on the Columbus Day weekend of October 1992. And the chosen form in which the author revisits his past and his vocation, writing, is no less structured--an opera in three acts with an overture to set the scene, arias for explication, and a concluding ``episong.'' The author/Barth is accompanied by his beloved second wife, his ``Reality Principle,'' as he sets sail on the fine Saturday afternoon, but as the cruise continues, the writer accidentally loses his beloved pen, ``Pumblechook,'' bought years ago in Charles Dickens's birthplace. Then the weather deteriorates, moods darken, and the US runs aground in an unfamiliar marsh. Seeking help, Barth comes across his twin sister, Jill; his lost pen; and his ``counterself,'' invented guide, and childhood friend, Jerry Schreiber, aka Jay Wordsworth Scribner, who's there to ``goose things along and frame and distance the whole show.'' Virtual reality takes over as the writer, claiming not to be writing an autobiography, but ``a kind of ship's log of the Inside Passage,'' revisits his childhood in Cambridge, Maryland; his first marriage; his college teaching; his writing successes, beginning with The Floating Opera; and his encounter with the woman who became his second wife. What's fiction and perhaps what's not is as tangled as the marsh grasses of Barth's native Dorchester County--and that's part of the fun, but the heavily schematic form, as well as the frequent literary one-upmanship, is more threatening to the venture than any fall storm. Very vintage Barth, and disappointingly so, despite the occasional reminders of a talent once new and stunningly inventive. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

John Barth, who hasn't been heard from for some time but who many still regard as the greatest living American author, has always been known as a challenging and provocative parodist of the wacky passage we call "life." Here he becomes one of his own characters as he narrates an excursion on board a yacht navigating Chesapeake Bay. Barth correlates incidents of the man-against-nature sort with a series of narrative asides that he calls "arias" because they allow the narrator to introduce us to the personal aspects of his life even though by necessity they interrupt the flow of the story. It is through them that Barth relates his publishing and romantic history, a voyage separate from the literal one at hand but relevant to it inasmuch as both entail negotiation of a number of rocky shoals. Definite appeal for his enthusiasts, of which there are many. Brad Hooper

In Barth's 12th book, a middle-aged writer and his wife sail into a time warp in the "Chesapeake Triangle," a Tidewater version of the Bermuda Triangle. Presented as "a memoir bottled in a novel," the book focuses on Barth's development as a writer. Highlights include his childhood on Maryland's isolated Eastern Shore, his introduction to literature as a book-shelver in the Johns Hopkins library, and his pivotal role in the burgeoning postmodernist movement. Several chapters are devoted to Barth's influential early novels, especially The Floating Opera (1956), whose nihilistic ending was changed at the publisher's insistence, then later restored when Barth's career took off. Apart from its documentary value to literary historians, the book's main strength is its evocation of life on the Eastern Shore in the Thirties and Forties. Recommended for larger collections of postmodernism.
--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.