Once Upon a Time
A Floating Opera.
272 pages.
Original publisher: Little, Brown.
Current publisher: Little, Brown.
Buy now from Amazon.com.
Synopsis
This disappointing semi-autobiography attempts to put Barth’s life in novelistic form. He becomes a character confronted by the shades of his past — a dead sister and a childhood friend, among others. Of course, in Barth’s world there’s never anything so simple as an autobiography, and so we are treated to an exegesis on the Jack and Jill rhyme, several allusions to Greek and Sumerian myth, and (surprise) lots of sailing. (Read my review.)
Critical Reaction
“What Mr. Barth has written is both a novel in the form of a memoir and a memoir in the form of a novel. The work leaps from one of these stools to the other and never rests easy on either of them, for the fiction demands no commitment and the fact commands no belief.”
— Phoebe-Lou Adams, The Atlantic
“John Barth, who hasn’t been heard from for some time but who many still regard as the greatest living American author, has always been known as a challenging and provocative parodist of the wacky passage we call ‘life.’ Here he becomes one of his own characters as he narrates an excursion on board a yacht navigating Chesapeake Bay…. Definite appeal for his enthusiasts, of which there are many.”
— Booklist
“In a reprise of old themes, haunts, and ideas, metafiction master Barth (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, 1991) returns to himself and his native Chesapeake Bay in this fictional memoir of a middle-aged writer embarked on an autumnal cruise…. Very vintage Barth, and disappointingly so, despite the occasional reminders of a talent once new and stunningly inventive.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Once Upon a Time is a celebration of the power of narrative, of the questions it must ask and can answer. As any of John Barth’s readers should expect, it is brilliantly conceived, elegantly written, bursting with life, profound in its understanding, bawdy and funny, and comic in the wisest and best sense of the word.”
— New York Times Book Review
Resources
- Review by The Atlantic
- Review by The New York Times
- Review by Dave Edelman (on this site)
- Once Upon a Time site on Time-Warner’s website
- An essay by Clara Bartocci: “John Barth’s Once Upon a Time: Fiction or Autobiography?”
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