Tales with a muse fail to amuse

Surely it has not been long enough since Sept. 11, 2001, for most of us to have forgotten how utterly changed everything seemed in the days, weeks and months that followed. Life’s daily routines -- its ordinary pleasures, sorrows, amusements and anxieties -- seemed altered in a way that was hard to describe. “The End of the World as We (Americans) Knew It,” or TEOTWAW(A)KI, is what John Barth’s alter-ego, Graybard, calls it in “The Book of Ten Nights and a Night.”

Barth, the well-known author of such 1960s postmodernist bellwethers as “The Sot-Weed Factor,” “Giles Goat-Boy” and “Lost in the Funhouse,” was getting ready to put out a collection of his stories (most of which had been published in the 1990s in various literary journals) when the catastrophic events of Sept. 11 made him question the value of his enterprise. These self-consciously literary tales, written at a time when the author took for granted a certain sense of security, struck him as irrelevant. Barth being Barth, he had already been planning to construct a narrative framework around these “originally unrelated tales ... connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts.”

In the wake of TEOTWAW- (A)KI, this narrative frame -- an ongoing interchange between Graybard, the Teller of Tales, and his muse, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) -- came to serve as a vehicle for discussing the potential relevance of irrelevance.

The case for irrelevance is actually quite easy to make, and Barth has no trouble making it. Graybard’s muse sets out the justifications in the first few pages of the book. The great storyteller Scheherazade created her “Thousand and One Arabian Nights” under the nightly threat of being beheaded by her murderous spouse, and the 14th century Florentine aristocrats who spun their yarns in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” were fleeing from a city being devastated by the Black Death.

Graybard takes her point: “Catastrophe, if not quite apocalypse, has them by the throat, but they spin their yarns nevertheless.” “Not nevertheless,” she replies, “therefore. And not apocalypse-tales, we note, but How Abu Hasan Farted, and How Friar Rinaldo Lies with His Godchild’s Mother and Her Husband Finds Him with Her and They Make Him Believe that the Friar Is Charming Away the Child’s Worms? Stuff like that.... [T]o tell irrelevant stories in grim circumstances is not only permissible, but sometimes therapeutic.”

The funny thing about these 11 stories is that they’re not all that irrelevant. Dealing with themes like time and mortality and featuring characters contemplating the overall tendency and meaning of their lives, Barth’s stories have little in common with the fantastic inventions of Scheherazade or the bawdy anecdotes of Boccaccio.

The collection’s earliest, “Landscape: The Eastern Shore,” first published in 1960, is also perhaps the best: a still-breathing portrait of an elderly man whose life seems to stretch out behind him rather than before him:

“And now the firmament swims in his salt tears, cold and joyless as the memory of old sins, curses hurled at all creation, grass gone clumpy on a mound, the weariness attendant on a surfeit of experience. When he left his chair of late to walk without needing to look along streets as familiar as the bloodcourses of his body, he walked only to reach his chair again, so it seems to him; he reached it hardly conscious that he had left, and for some days now he has not gone out at all.”

The remaining stories, all dating from the last 10 years, far from being wildly diverse and in need of a unifying frame, bear an uncanny resemblance to one another. Almost all feature happily married, middle-aged couples -- in one, the husband’s a journalist; in another, he’s a writer; in another, an academic. Almost all are written in the same mock-sociological style: “No annus mirabilis, maybe, 1956, but a considerable corner-turn in his/their life: formal education and apprenticeship finished; family established and now appropriately housed; children safely through babyhood....” Or: “About Adam Johnson Bauer, retired American, who, like many of his now age (late middle) and class (middle middle), had married in the mid-twentieth-century postwar euphoria, before such concerns as runaway population growth and environmental degradation had set in.... “

Whatever else can be said about them, these stories, less stories than set-piece illustrations of a certain stratum of late 20th century American society, can scarcely be called irrelevant. Whether read on their own or in the context of Sept. 11, they seem to be making a statement about who “we” are. The problem is simply that they are not very good: arch, self-conscious, lifeless, lacking energy, color, substance and weight. Reading them is like watching a writer put himself through a series of literary exercises.

And this feeling, alas, is enhanced by the coyly jocular narrative framework that Barth has superimposed, in which Graybard and WYSIWYG convene for nightly bouts of sexual congress (metaphorical, of course) and conversation about the stories, making the whole business seem even more rote, more academic, more of an exercise. Although Barth may have gone to the trouble of endowing his book with a muse, the classic figure of inspiration, inspiration is exactly what’s lacking.