[The author of Letters manages] to keep a sober promise he makes early on, namely that "the several narratives will become one." He brings it off by framing the individual narratives in a film production, an attempt by a moviemaker to create a screen version not of one of his books but of all of them, including those still unwritten. (p. 91)

Midway in Letters, Barth reproduces a patch of his own correspondence in which he asserts that the book "will not be obscure, difficult, or dense in the Modernist fashion." And he adds that, while "it will hazard the resurrection of characters from my previous fiction … as well as extending the fictions themselves, [it] will not presume, on the reader's part, familiarity with those fictions, which I cannot myself remember in detail." I'm sorry to report that there's some self-deception in these observations. Ambiguities of identity in the...