[In Letters, the] subplots, counterplots, and crossplots … exfoliate maddeningly and impinge even more maddeningly upon one another. Its language ranges from the disconcertingly flat and factual to the disconcertingly baroque, from drab to lunatic-ornate. And when it is not tracing insane patterns of coincidence and repetition—patterns almost as insane, indeed, as those of "real life"—the story is variously lubricous, violent, and macabre: rape, murder, suicide, arson, pillage, incest, and cancer are among the prominent and structurally supporting gargoyles of Barth's design….

[Everything] is—deliberately—"wrong" with Letters that is "wrong" with that most ancient, most shaky, and most cherished of human defenses against the void: fiction itself. Between the bloodless abstractions of reason and the bloody compulsions of passion we live out our single lives and the life of the species, and we make up stories, invent mythologies, to explain and heal the real, the infinitely...