John Barth’s Escape From Nihilism

The majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends. Don DeLillo (87), Thomas Pynchon (87), Joseph McElroy (93) and Robert Coover (92) can still, as yet, contrast life with lore. The bitter privilege must have been a confirmation for John Barth, who recently died at 93, since the tidewater metafictionist specialized in measuring the wobbly frames of narrative against the hurricane of experience. Having lived mostly as a novelist ensconced within academia, a great many of the years therein spent along the cloistered waters of the Chesapeake, Barth once remarked to Michiko Kakutani that he’d led “a serene, tranquil and absolutely non-Byronic life.” In public statements, essays and fiction, Barth was always penning segments of his own eulogy, smuggling themes and flourishes into his life’s account before death could settle it. What he variably described as our “inclination to see our lives as stories” was a cognitive reflex, something humans did continuously, helplessly, to shape and temper experience, even if we knew it would violate “all agreeable plans and expectations.” At the time of Kakutani’s profile, Barth was presumably unaware that he would live for another 42 years.