In a novel [Letters] that takes many risks, the identity of the correspondents is the biggest risk of all. They are all figures from Barth's previous fiction…. [Even] though the letters generate their own energy and the correspondents develop their own lives, the choice of the correspondents still retains a coterie effect…. The device does, to be sure, expand two conceits which, now and then, enter the minds of all readers of fiction. The first is that playful act in which one rearranges characters, placing Becky Sharp in Swann's Way or Huckleberry Finn in The Wings of the Dove. Barth's fictions are very different from one another; and thus characters from each of them, placed in the same work, make a collage which is startling and amusing. The second conceit is that equally playful act in which one imagines the lives of characters after the book is finished…. And here too, Barth's choice allows him an eccentric excursion into the implicit sequels of his characters' lives. Two more significant effects of such a choice, however, are the exercise they permit Barth with the fictive and the real (characters ingratiate their way into the book, or deny any interest in becoming a part of the book, all of this in letters to Barth, an author then living in Buffalo, the fictional invention of an author, named Barth, then living in Buffalo), and the exercise they permit Barth with history, which is, ultimately, the "subject" of the novel. (p. 341)
[Letters] is, in its way, an extraordinary exercise in intersecting perspectives, intersecting rhetorics, intersecting ways of organizing the world…. Although I can think of many works, historical and fictional, that treat history encyclopedically, reaching for range, scope and inclusiveness, I can think of no other work that seeks to bring together jingoism and detachment, the eyewitness view and the distant generalization, the computerized, and the humane, the sensuous and the chaste, the compulsively gossipy and the bored, the affectionate and the cynical. It is a book that confirms one's conviction that, for pure talent, the ability to do anything with words, nobody is better than Barth. But the rhythms of Letters tend to overwhelm. That old-fashioned epistolary novel immersed us in the continuing lives of its correspondents, like an afternoon soap, and its duration seemed somehow appropriate to the intimacy of its experience. Barth's book, on the other hand, does not invite us to enter a world: there are seven different and incongruent worlds. It does not invite us to enter the chess game of moves and countermoves that the older form provided, because the correspondents rarely interact or, when they do, they generally interact only perfunctorily….
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