Boys Gone Wild

Beginning with the affected title of Ben Marcus' recent essay in Harper's-"Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It"-the reading world found itself witness to yet another sordid literary feud. Here was another dour, wounded, resentful young man (why are young men lucky enough to work creatively always so resentful?) to be patiently allowed to vent, petted, tongue-clucked and told, "Yes, yes, you're very smart, too."

Marcus' vendetta is against the literary establishment, which, in his interpretation, marginalizes experimental fiction and promotes authors with a bent for traditional realism, a commercial trend most vocally advocated by Jonathan Franzen. Franzen, whose name recognition has more to do with Oprah Winfrey than the quality of his writing, has been gropingly whining about the discontents of success for years now, and insofar as Marcus takes him to task for it he does a yeoman's service. But reading the essay we quickly realize that Marcus' ultimate aim is not to expose Franzen's fatuities, or even to argue the value of postmodernism, but really to convince the world that he is the one who is entitled to whine.

In his eagerness to wear the ridiculous crown of thorns so often coveted by minor artists, Marcus speaks again and again of being disenfranchised and "sucker-punched" by a cabal of traditionalists leagued against him and, apparently, the long-dead William Gaddis-a group that, like most conspiratorial cabals, of course does not exist.

What is depressing about Marcus' jeremiad is the sight of someone so keen on the avant-garde repeating an argument made nearly forty years ago. His dismissal of realism as a "worn out technique" that "has already been accomplished" is an uncanny iteration of John Barth's essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," which occasioned great debate when it ran in the Atlantic in 1967. In the piece Barth bemoaned the "used-upness of certain forms;" just as Marcus has done, Barth complained that "experimental" was "an adjective of dismissal."

It is surely telling that Barth retracted many of his points years later when the essay was reprinted in a collection, The Friday Book. (Likewise, Franzen edited away much of his contentious Harper's piece for How to Be Alone; and breaking all land-speed records, Marcus tries to soft-pedal his arguments at the end of the very essay in which they appear, claiming "This is not a manifesto," as though we had not just read pages of bitter and calculated disparagement.) "The Literature of Exhaustion" seems silly now, but not discreditable, and this is because time has pardoned John Barth, pardoned him for writing well. Of his large corpus, I've only read The Sot-Weed Factor and Lost in the Funhouse, but both are funny, exuberant and relentlessly ingenious. His rambunctious new book, Where Three Roads Meet, though minor in comparison, still fulgurates with moments of his old storytelling brilliance.

The book is comprised of three short novels, linked by more thematic threads than I could pick out, much less recount here. To give an example, "As I Was Saying?" (the third novella) is narrated by three sisters who teasingly resemble the three Fates and recount being the accidental inspirations of a Henry Milleresque character who writes a fictional trilogy about them. "Tell Me" is about the three-way friendship/tutorship of a promising student with his TA and TA's girlfriend that vamps on all the classic stories of the young hero's initiation to manhood, and bursts from the margins with word play and jeu de mots.

With "I've Been Told: A Story's Story," Barth gives free reign to his love of metafiction. This is narrated by Story, who drives around in a Dramatic Vehicle: "Once upon a time, I've been told, we Stories kicked off with 'Once upon a time,' or some other such Square One formulation, and then took it from there: Leda lays egg, egg hatches Helen, Helen lays Paris, Greeks lay waste to Troy, et cetera." But this is the worst section of the book, because it is all conceit. Except for an amusing interlude about a boy with the fateful name of Phil Blank, this novella has no story and is too clotted with bad puns and the promiscuous blending of words like "doth," "yonder," and "a-rarin" to be readable.

Story (not the character, I mean) is the bedrock of Barth's best experiments, and because those in Where Three Roads Meet are mostly set on college campuses, there really is a sense that he's repainting the faded marble of classical myths. The sisters in "As I Was Saying?" are recording their story for posterity on a cassette tape, which makes for delightful (if not quite plausible) sibling banter throughout. And because the student in "Tell Me" is trying to discover himself and his voice, he's constantly being interrupted by his TA. Again, the result is lively and engaging.

Barth is past his prime, but it is good to remember that he can write entertaining books without having to accompany them with defensive screeds. So perhaps we can look forward to when Franzen and Marcus mellow down. If we're lucky, it will be another forty years before another traditional/ experimental debate froths up betweeen two new young, embittered male egos.