The Tidewater Tales (1987) by John Barth

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Tidewater Tales (1987)

by John Barth

Cheaspeake Bay, Virginia

Virginia: 12/17

  AND I'M BACK!!!!

   This 600 page plus BEHEMOTH of a novel took me over a month to complete.  It really had me thinking about the novel as an artform and the various ways audiences and publishers collaborate to fix the form of a novel.  It also reminded me of the discourse surrounding Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and whether it might be the worst book ever.  Frankly it is hard to imagine the literary world where this book was launched.  It's about a waspish couple who take their sail boat around the Chesapeake Bay for a couple weeks.  It is loosely structured around the idea of Scheherazade  and 1,001 Nights but it was so tedious trying to really figure what was happening I felt content to just drift along.  There was a lot about the female partner's prior marriage to a would-be Maryland politician.  There were several chapters detailing the travel of various named sperm on a race to fertilize the egg of the female half of the couple on the boat.  There is a sub-plot about the death of a probably CIA operative in the Chesapeake Bay and plenty about the family history of the couple.

    It's a very waspy affair and in that sense it's a welcome break from the middle and working class perspectives of most of the books in this chapter.  Something I took for granted before I started this project was the idea that literary fiction is written from the perspective of literary PEOPLE, now I understand this whole world both of proletarian and middle class fiction where the characters don't give a hoot about books let alone literary culture.