The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

Book cover for 'The Book of Ten Nights and a Night'257 pages.
Original publisher: Little, Brown.
Current publisher: Back Bay Books.
Buy now from Amazon.com.

Synopsis

Barth returns to the short story form once again. As he did in On with the Story, the author isn’t content to just throw his previously published works into a collection; no, Barth concocts a frame story in which an aging author shacks up with his Muse to tell his tales.

Ordinarily I might find such a framing device to be tedious. Here, it serves to accent and enhance the individual pieces in ways that are often surprising and touching. The stories themselves are often fascinating (”The Rest of Your Life”), occasionally irritating (”Click”) — and sometimes even just ordinary (”And Then There’s the One”). But interlaced with comparisons to the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, they become an extraordinary argument for the relevancy of storytelling in the post-9/11 era.

Barth rarely strays from his standard topics: the state of narrative fiction in a television world, how the act of storytelling informs and enlightens, the power of language. Through it all, there’s a tinge of resignation that’s rarely colored Barth’s work before. Say what you will about 2001’s Coming Soon!!! (and many, like me, have not had particularly good things to say about it), but it does maintain a very upbeat tone throughout. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, by contrast, frequently dwells on death and finality.

Contents

  • Help!
  • Landscape: The Eastern Shore
  • The Ring
  • Dead Cat, Floating Boy
  • A Detective and a Turtle
  • The Rest of Your Life
  • The Big Shrink
  • Extension
  • And Then There’s the One
  • 9999
  • Click
  • Wysiwyg?

Critical Reaction

“Graybard’s antic, self-reflective tales focus not on world events but rather on lust, marriage, family, age, and the added dimensions that dreams, fantasies, and fiction bring to life…. For all his narrative-interrupting commentary, Barth can’t help but be a magnetic storyteller.”

— Booklist

“After this slow start Barth finally gets his engine running, and it’s like the Barth of years gone by — in other words, fun to read…. It’s as if Barth had rediscovered the muse he’s had a hard time finding in his fiction over the last 25 years. Reading this book is like picking up his 1968 collection Lost in the Funhouse or his 1972 novel Chimera and laughing with the author as he constantly reinvents storytelling…. [W]orks as well if not better than his acclaimed stories in Lost in the Funhouse.”

— Houston Chronicle

“The few bright spots in an otherwise dismal bunch include the first night…. The rest are filled with the gaseous, colorless chitchat characteristic of Barth’s late style. Distressingly, Barth’s inversion of the old writer’s adage, ’show, don’t tell,’ has led him to a garrulous abyss: he tells and tells, but has nothing to show, leaving the reader with no reason to read him.”

— Publishers Weekly

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