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The Tidewater Tales
"Tell me a story..." Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore, 8 1/2 months pregnant, is a blue-blooded library scientist and founding mother of the American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling. Her husband Peter, 8 1/2 months nervous, is a blue-collar storyteller with a penchant for brevity. Sailing in the Chesapeake Bay, they tell each other tales to break the writer's block handed Peter by his Muse, to ease the weight of Katherine's pregnancy, to entertain, and to enlighten. Along with their stories, we learn of the Bay itself―past and present. The beloved Chesapeake, where young Peter once indulged his Huck Finn fantasy, is in danger of becoming what he dubs a moral cesspool; where nature is in a losing struggle with man; where the hallowed Deniston School for Girls is being pressured by the CIA to sell land to the Soviet embassy; and where the old Sagamore homestead might or might not be the newest espionage station on the shoreline.
655 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
12 people are currently reading
814 people want to read
About the author
John Barth
76 books796 followersJohn Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composed
The Shirt of Nessus
, a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
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August 5, 2022
Tidewater Tales is John Barth’s nautical novel but his boat sails so slow as if there is a dead calm… Man and wife are in the same boat… And the boat sails on…
The novel is a baggy compendium of tales and anecdotes and the tale of Don Quixote retold in some weird new way…
The author’s voyage is a kind of quixotic journey and when two souls are at sea, this phenomenon is called solipsisme à deux…
If one sails around the world, one sails nowhere.
The novel is a baggy compendium of tales and anecdotes and the tale of Don Quixote retold in some weird new way…
There are two bombs aboard… Much gets discussed, and little or nothing gets done, with excellent reason. The twin bombs don’t go off… and the passengers and crew go home and eat and drink and breathe some more. Over the years, they get cancers and have heart attacks and give birth to defective children.
The author’s voyage is a kind of quixotic journey and when two souls are at sea, this phenomenon is called solipsisme à deux…
If one sails around the world, one sails nowhere.
Read
May 20, 2017“Show, don’t tell.” But what if you are a story teller? And are there not better media for showing? What does this little mantra, or such nuggets as “Write what you know” (was it McElroy or Barthelme who said “Write what you don’t know”?), prescribe? May I suggest that it prescribes only a single narrow possibility of narrative construction, and perhaps even prescribes a non-narrative, painterly novel writing; that when narrative comes along we no longer in fact “show” but we tell tell tell! Tell me a story!
The Tidewater Tales is a dithyramb to story telling. It is Barth’s love song to the greatest works our human cultures have created, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Scheherazade, which all are themselves hymns to the power of and purposes of and pleasures of and necessity of telling stories stories stories. Barth’s novel is an exquisite instance of his beloved frame-tale and is written in the relaxed mode of floating upon the Chesapeake Bay amidst the nearly countless Doomsday Factors which ring round that bay--CIA & KGB, The Pentagon, nearly countless nefarious USofA agencies plotting our destruction, illegal dumping of toxic waste, etc--much as the stories of The Decameron are told upon a pleasant retreat to the countryside whilst Europe is ravaged by Black Death. Barth, the happy nihilist. But twins will be brought into this world and a novel will be written and stories will be told.
Barth is Barth. He does write what he knows. There is sailing. There is, as noted, the Chesapeake Bay without which we scarcely have a Barth novel. There are stories and storytellers and fictionists. There are frames. Nihilism. Getting on with it. And formalism; Tidewater is as tightly structured as any of his other novels, nearly as formalized as LETTERS. And of course we have a very Barth-like novelist protagonist who is failing with his Less Is More attempts at fiction. More is More!!! But mostly what we have is joyful prose, reveling in words, finding connections and parallels and coincidences, playing, sailing along, just-for-the-hell-of-it-ing, replenishment in the midst of exhaustion, passionate virtuosity and virtuosic passion. This is Lovers Fiction.
For the record, I would like to indicate the fact that I read this novel over the course of two weeks, and those two weeks fell exactly 32.5 years after the two weeks in the Summer of 1980 during which the action of The Tidewater Tales takes place, two weeks which are framed by the twin storms Blam! and Blooey! which occurred respectively on Sundays June 15 & 29, 1980. This Review is written two days hence of the 32.5 year anniversary of Storm Blooey! I would also like to think that Barth wrote this novel between June 15 & 29, 1987, during the seven year (Sabbatical!) anniversary celebration of the events of The Tales.
____________
The opportunity taken to sketch out the works of Barth, a quasi-readers guide, now that my Barth Completionism draws to a close, with only his two latest slender volumes remaining outstanding.
Existentialist Barth; or, Pre-Barthianism
The Floating Opera
The End of the Road
Fortunately, Barth’s first “novel,” a failed faulknerism, was lost or stolen from the John Hopkins library. These two are loved by many, but do not exhibit that for which Barth has earned a reputation.
Golden Age of Barth
The Sot-Weed Factor
Giles Goat-Boy
Both of these are parodies of the hero’s journey, the first written in ignorance of the journey and the second with full intention. Many folks prefer one over the other. Both represent Barth’s life-long quest to replenish an exhausted narrative tradition by returning to earlier forms of novel writing, the picaresque of The Factor and the quest in Giles.
Barth Shortens It
Lost in the Funhouse
Chimera
This pair is where we first begin to meet Barth the metafictionist.
LETTERS
LETTERS
Please read the prior six books before attempting LETTERS. Of course, it goes without saying, that this advice is not necessary. But you’ll have read those six already anyway. This mammoth novel finds Barth at his most perfected formalism and returning to the very beginning of the English noveling tradition, the epistolary novel of Richardson, that tradition most in need of replenishment.
Middle Aged But Not Laurel-Resting
Sabbatical: A Romance
The Tidewater Tales
These twins are much closer to being identical twins than any of Barth’s other twins. These two share some story and plot DNA and thus I’d recommend reading Sabbatical first. I believe they receive inadequate attention, perhaps because his happy nihilist tone does not fit well with many readers’ demands for a kind of sturm und drang experience. I don’t know. Maybe they are books for middle aged folks who could use a sabbatical or a just getting away from it all.
Memoirs
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera
The second is explicitly identified as a “memoirish novel.” But after enough Barth one finds a great deal of memoirish material. Somebody is a love affair with Scheherazade.
Something About Twins Fails To Instantiate
With a few Barth novels under the belt I do highly recommend taking a gander through his first two essay collections, The Friday Book and Further Fridays (Final Fridays for completionists only). Barth sheds a great deal of light upon his own books, but also addresses questions of postmodern fiction, his generation of literary creators, etc, quite perspicaciously.
On With the Story was my introduction to Barth back in 1996. Short stories with a framing apparatus.
Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative, which recycles his previous floating opera materials and bits from various versions of Showboat! etc, is I suspect for Barth completists only.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories is a career-spanning collection of shorts spun together with a framing device. Uneven as such collections tend to be.
Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas felt like a great place to start with Barth for his formalist and meta-fictionalist interests.
The Final Twins
The Development
Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons
And when I do, I’ll have my Barth Completionist badge. These two should be read in order.
Final Required Reading
Friend Paul has written the only most accurate evaluation of the value of Barth’s fiction which I have ever read. Period. See his review of Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons .
The Tidewater Tales is a dithyramb to story telling. It is Barth’s love song to the greatest works our human cultures have created, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Scheherazade, which all are themselves hymns to the power of and purposes of and pleasures of and necessity of telling stories stories stories. Barth’s novel is an exquisite instance of his beloved frame-tale and is written in the relaxed mode of floating upon the Chesapeake Bay amidst the nearly countless Doomsday Factors which ring round that bay--CIA & KGB, The Pentagon, nearly countless nefarious USofA agencies plotting our destruction, illegal dumping of toxic waste, etc--much as the stories of The Decameron are told upon a pleasant retreat to the countryside whilst Europe is ravaged by Black Death. Barth, the happy nihilist. But twins will be brought into this world and a novel will be written and stories will be told.
Barth is Barth. He does write what he knows. There is sailing. There is, as noted, the Chesapeake Bay without which we scarcely have a Barth novel. There are stories and storytellers and fictionists. There are frames. Nihilism. Getting on with it. And formalism; Tidewater is as tightly structured as any of his other novels, nearly as formalized as LETTERS. And of course we have a very Barth-like novelist protagonist who is failing with his Less Is More attempts at fiction. More is More!!! But mostly what we have is joyful prose, reveling in words, finding connections and parallels and coincidences, playing, sailing along, just-for-the-hell-of-it-ing, replenishment in the midst of exhaustion, passionate virtuosity and virtuosic passion. This is Lovers Fiction.
For the record, I would like to indicate the fact that I read this novel over the course of two weeks, and those two weeks fell exactly 32.5 years after the two weeks in the Summer of 1980 during which the action of The Tidewater Tales takes place, two weeks which are framed by the twin storms Blam! and Blooey! which occurred respectively on Sundays June 15 & 29, 1980. This Review is written two days hence of the 32.5 year anniversary of Storm Blooey! I would also like to think that Barth wrote this novel between June 15 & 29, 1987, during the seven year (Sabbatical!) anniversary celebration of the events of The Tales.
____________
The opportunity taken to sketch out the works of Barth, a quasi-readers guide, now that my Barth Completionism draws to a close, with only his two latest slender volumes remaining outstanding.
Existentialist Barth; or, Pre-Barthianism
The Floating Opera
The End of the Road
Fortunately, Barth’s first “novel,” a failed faulknerism, was lost or stolen from the John Hopkins library. These two are loved by many, but do not exhibit that for which Barth has earned a reputation.
Golden Age of Barth
The Sot-Weed Factor
Giles Goat-Boy
Both of these are parodies of the hero’s journey, the first written in ignorance of the journey and the second with full intention. Many folks prefer one over the other. Both represent Barth’s life-long quest to replenish an exhausted narrative tradition by returning to earlier forms of novel writing, the picaresque of The Factor and the quest in Giles.
Barth Shortens It
Lost in the Funhouse
Chimera
This pair is where we first begin to meet Barth the metafictionist.
LETTERS
LETTERS
Please read the prior six books before attempting LETTERS. Of course, it goes without saying, that this advice is not necessary. But you’ll have read those six already anyway. This mammoth novel finds Barth at his most perfected formalism and returning to the very beginning of the English noveling tradition, the epistolary novel of Richardson, that tradition most in need of replenishment.
Middle Aged But Not Laurel-Resting
Sabbatical: A Romance
The Tidewater Tales
These twins are much closer to being identical twins than any of Barth’s other twins. These two share some story and plot DNA and thus I’d recommend reading Sabbatical first. I believe they receive inadequate attention, perhaps because his happy nihilist tone does not fit well with many readers’ demands for a kind of sturm und drang experience. I don’t know. Maybe they are books for middle aged folks who could use a sabbatical or a just getting away from it all.
Memoirs
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera
The second is explicitly identified as a “memoirish novel.” But after enough Barth one finds a great deal of memoirish material. Somebody is a love affair with Scheherazade.
Something About Twins Fails To Instantiate
With a few Barth novels under the belt I do highly recommend taking a gander through his first two essay collections, The Friday Book and Further Fridays (Final Fridays for completionists only). Barth sheds a great deal of light upon his own books, but also addresses questions of postmodern fiction, his generation of literary creators, etc, quite perspicaciously.
On With the Story was my introduction to Barth back in 1996. Short stories with a framing apparatus.
Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative, which recycles his previous floating opera materials and bits from various versions of Showboat! etc, is I suspect for Barth completists only.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories is a career-spanning collection of shorts spun together with a framing device. Uneven as such collections tend to be.
Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas felt like a great place to start with Barth for his formalist and meta-fictionalist interests.
The Final Twins
The Development
Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons
And when I do, I’ll have my Barth Completionist badge. These two should be read in order.
Final Required Reading
Friend Paul has written the only most accurate evaluation of the value of Barth’s fiction which I have ever read. Period. See his review of Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons .
January 27, 2024
How does the tide come in at Ocean City?
The tide comes in at Ocean City by chasing the moon of inspiration and washing a little further up the beach of Where We’re Going with each wave and then rolling back to pick up Where We’ve Been. At the tale’s high-water mark, the past overtakes the present and sweeps us to a finale rich and strange.
If on a winter night a traveller named John Barth comes knocking at your door, you better beware Reader: he has the gift of gab and he loves to play with words, but he may stay for more than one night for, unlike his hero Peter Sagamore, Barth doesn’t really believe that Less is More. He would like to continue telling stories, probably, for one thousand nights and one, just like his role model, the lady Sheherazade.
More is More in this sprawling, meandering, picaresque novel of sailing the tidewaters of Chesapeake Bay, letting the winds blow the narration whither they will.
Peter Sagamore is a writer and teacher of literature with a very successful first novel, followed by a series of shorter and shorter works that will lead asymptotically to zero, aka writer’s block. His wife, Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, is an American princess with a degree in library science and a brown belt in oral storytelling.
She is also 8 1/2 months pregnant and restless with worries about her husband’s career and about the direction the country is heading.
The couple of middle-aged intellectuals set sail on their 25-foot boat, and the husband is tasked to entertain his wife with stories.
Tell me their story as if it weren’t our story, but enough like our story so that the gods of storytelling will take the helm and man the sheets and blow us and it to a harbor we never could have predicted.
Boyoboy. Peter’s look is pained indeed. Don’t I wish I could.
What are we doing out here?
Says Katherine at the helm We’re taking us sailing and telling a story to these postmodern children of ours: Show and Kiss and Tell.
Whither the current of the story fetches me, thither shall I go in this enchanted boat
I have gladly let myself sail across the Chesapeake Bay and across the postmodern histories of Peter and Kate Sagamore, despite feeling later in the journey that this is turning into The Neverending Story. John Barth comes probably closer than any other American writer to the intellectual stimulation and to the joy of word games of Italo Calvino, enough so that I was willing to let myself drift with the tides and linger overnight in various coves and river mouths, listening to one more Significant and Metaphorical story of life as a journey, luckily for P and K with a little sex thrown in, just as Alan Moore recommends.
Peter declares We’re all consenting adults, sexually educated and dramaturgically mature.
Probably the most impressive part of the novel for me is the way John Barth illustrates the process of reanastomosis Peter Sagamore is going through as he tries to overcome his writer’s block by going back to the basics, by invoking his Gods of Storytelling, by reuniting the realism of Chesapeake Bay history, the extensive background details for his characters and the political landscape of modern day America with the mythical cornerstones of our common cultural landscape.
Hedonism may be another name for this game, in equal parts joy at ordinary pleasures and willing blindness to the existential terrors of modern man. How else could two intelligent people, well connected and well informed about their surroundings, decide to bring a couple of kids into a world heading fast towards Apocalypse?
Today we’re being carefree chickens on the python’s back, cluck cluck.
Note: the fable of the chickens locked into a cage with a hungry python is one of the Tidewater Tales told aboard the boat named Story
Similarly, one of the literary gods invoked by Peter Sagamore is named Robert Louis Stevenson, who allegedly said that:
... except for the ephemeral pleasures of sex and a few other satisfactions, the human facts of life and death and history are so dismaying that only some reflexive numbness or self-mesmerism keeps even the most favored of us from going screaming mad.
Don’t you love it, Reader, when the storyteller includes the critical points and the commentary in the text, for your illumination and better understanding of the whole postmodern ethos? Like why this novel really needs to be one thousand plus one pages long? It’s a mighty complicated world we live in, after all.
If Byzantium is where we live, we mustn’t throw up our hands at byzantine complexity, right?
One of the most byzantine plot lines in the novel is about the dozens of secret government and military installations that dot the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Much as they would like, Peter and Kate cannot sail outside the reaches of all those three lettered acronyms and their personal journey is tightly interwoven with several conspiracy theories.
Covert government security operations, like organized criminal operations, are cancers in the body democratic. They have in common that they corrupt and falsify individuals and institutions.
This isn’t fiction; it’s the world we really live in.
>>><<<>>><<<
Much as I liked the X-rated personal histories of Peter and Kate and their families and friends, or their leisurely dinners, bare ass swimming and wordplay, the one part of the novel I was really looking forward to is the meeting with the Gods of Storytelling, sailing their own unusual boats into Chesapeake Bay and crossing paths with the Sagamore yacht Story
Scheherazade yarning through the night to save her neck, Odysseus homeward-striving through the wine-dark perils of the sea, D.Q. and Sancho colloquizing across the Spanish plain, Huck Finn araft with Jim, down the Father of Waters, et cetera.
They are not the only fictional characters that the tide pushes into the Chesapeake Bay, but these four are probably the stars that Peter steers by in the literary storms that blow his way: Blam and Blooey!
When he describes a youthful visit to Portugal, in search of inspiration for his first novel, and on the run from a disastrous love affair with a modern poetess, Peter also mentions ... the household gods in my backpack, a couple of Bollingen Press mythology books by Carl Jung and Joseph Cambell
Every saltwater writer probably dreams of writing something enduring and timeless like the Odyssey, the Arabian Tales or Don Quijote. Peter must somehow reconcile his dreams of glory with the white page sitting in front of him and admit that even if he doesn’t quite achieve godhood, the journey is worth taking.
So, dear Reader, at the end of our sailing holiday please stop at the boutique on the docks and order your commemorative T-shirt with the TKTTTITT logo. Hopefully, dear Reader, you will reach the same conclusion as Katherine Sherritt Sagamore:
... she had come to truly understand that both in human intimacies and in human language, the key to the treasure is the treasure.
On with the story, et cetera.
>>><<<>>><<<
This was my first novel by John Barth, but almost certainly the winds of modern storytelling will blow another one of his ships into my harbour. I will follow his advice and not complain about his meandering ways and byzantine plots and chose instead to believe I am not lost in the third millennium:
Maybe you are. Or it could be you’re just astray in the funhouse and taking the long way home.
Reader: May the world not soon end, for this life is sweet, here and there, and Back Creek is beautiful. God’s curse upon the Doomsday and the Sot-Weed Factors, upon all who leach and taint and subdivide, coerce and bully and kill. But upon the peacemakers and the conservators, thy blessing and ours, amen.
The tide comes in at Ocean City by chasing the moon of inspiration and washing a little further up the beach of Where We’re Going with each wave and then rolling back to pick up Where We’ve Been. At the tale’s high-water mark, the past overtakes the present and sweeps us to a finale rich and strange.
If on a winter night a traveller named John Barth comes knocking at your door, you better beware Reader: he has the gift of gab and he loves to play with words, but he may stay for more than one night for, unlike his hero Peter Sagamore, Barth doesn’t really believe that Less is More. He would like to continue telling stories, probably, for one thousand nights and one, just like his role model, the lady Sheherazade.
More is More in this sprawling, meandering, picaresque novel of sailing the tidewaters of Chesapeake Bay, letting the winds blow the narration whither they will.
Peter Sagamore is a writer and teacher of literature with a very successful first novel, followed by a series of shorter and shorter works that will lead asymptotically to zero, aka writer’s block. His wife, Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, is an American princess with a degree in library science and a brown belt in oral storytelling.
She is also 8 1/2 months pregnant and restless with worries about her husband’s career and about the direction the country is heading.
The couple of middle-aged intellectuals set sail on their 25-foot boat, and the husband is tasked to entertain his wife with stories.
Tell me their story as if it weren’t our story, but enough like our story so that the gods of storytelling will take the helm and man the sheets and blow us and it to a harbor we never could have predicted.
Boyoboy. Peter’s look is pained indeed. Don’t I wish I could.
What are we doing out here?
Says Katherine at the helm We’re taking us sailing and telling a story to these postmodern children of ours: Show and Kiss and Tell.
Whither the current of the story fetches me, thither shall I go in this enchanted boat
I have gladly let myself sail across the Chesapeake Bay and across the postmodern histories of Peter and Kate Sagamore, despite feeling later in the journey that this is turning into The Neverending Story. John Barth comes probably closer than any other American writer to the intellectual stimulation and to the joy of word games of Italo Calvino, enough so that I was willing to let myself drift with the tides and linger overnight in various coves and river mouths, listening to one more Significant and Metaphorical story of life as a journey, luckily for P and K with a little sex thrown in, just as Alan Moore recommends.
Peter declares We’re all consenting adults, sexually educated and dramaturgically mature.
Probably the most impressive part of the novel for me is the way John Barth illustrates the process of reanastomosis Peter Sagamore is going through as he tries to overcome his writer’s block by going back to the basics, by invoking his Gods of Storytelling, by reuniting the realism of Chesapeake Bay history, the extensive background details for his characters and the political landscape of modern day America with the mythical cornerstones of our common cultural landscape.
Hedonism may be another name for this game, in equal parts joy at ordinary pleasures and willing blindness to the existential terrors of modern man. How else could two intelligent people, well connected and well informed about their surroundings, decide to bring a couple of kids into a world heading fast towards Apocalypse?
Today we’re being carefree chickens on the python’s back, cluck cluck.
Note: the fable of the chickens locked into a cage with a hungry python is one of the Tidewater Tales told aboard the boat named Story
Similarly, one of the literary gods invoked by Peter Sagamore is named Robert Louis Stevenson, who allegedly said that:
... except for the ephemeral pleasures of sex and a few other satisfactions, the human facts of life and death and history are so dismaying that only some reflexive numbness or self-mesmerism keeps even the most favored of us from going screaming mad.
Don’t you love it, Reader, when the storyteller includes the critical points and the commentary in the text, for your illumination and better understanding of the whole postmodern ethos? Like why this novel really needs to be one thousand plus one pages long? It’s a mighty complicated world we live in, after all.
If Byzantium is where we live, we mustn’t throw up our hands at byzantine complexity, right?
One of the most byzantine plot lines in the novel is about the dozens of secret government and military installations that dot the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Much as they would like, Peter and Kate cannot sail outside the reaches of all those three lettered acronyms and their personal journey is tightly interwoven with several conspiracy theories.
Covert government security operations, like organized criminal operations, are cancers in the body democratic. They have in common that they corrupt and falsify individuals and institutions.
This isn’t fiction; it’s the world we really live in.
>>><<<>>><<<
Much as I liked the X-rated personal histories of Peter and Kate and their families and friends, or their leisurely dinners, bare ass swimming and wordplay, the one part of the novel I was really looking forward to is the meeting with the Gods of Storytelling, sailing their own unusual boats into Chesapeake Bay and crossing paths with the Sagamore yacht Story
Scheherazade yarning through the night to save her neck, Odysseus homeward-striving through the wine-dark perils of the sea, D.Q. and Sancho colloquizing across the Spanish plain, Huck Finn araft with Jim, down the Father of Waters, et cetera.
They are not the only fictional characters that the tide pushes into the Chesapeake Bay, but these four are probably the stars that Peter steers by in the literary storms that blow his way: Blam and Blooey!
When he describes a youthful visit to Portugal, in search of inspiration for his first novel, and on the run from a disastrous love affair with a modern poetess, Peter also mentions ... the household gods in my backpack, a couple of Bollingen Press mythology books by Carl Jung and Joseph Cambell
Every saltwater writer probably dreams of writing something enduring and timeless like the Odyssey, the Arabian Tales or Don Quijote. Peter must somehow reconcile his dreams of glory with the white page sitting in front of him and admit that even if he doesn’t quite achieve godhood, the journey is worth taking.
So, dear Reader, at the end of our sailing holiday please stop at the boutique on the docks and order your commemorative T-shirt with the TKTTTITT logo. Hopefully, dear Reader, you will reach the same conclusion as Katherine Sherritt Sagamore:
... she had come to truly understand that both in human intimacies and in human language, the key to the treasure is the treasure.
On with the story, et cetera.
>>><<<>>><<<
This was my first novel by John Barth, but almost certainly the winds of modern storytelling will blow another one of his ships into my harbour. I will follow his advice and not complain about his meandering ways and byzantine plots and chose instead to believe I am not lost in the third millennium:
Maybe you are. Or it could be you’re just astray in the funhouse and taking the long way home.
Reader: May the world not soon end, for this life is sweet, here and there, and Back Creek is beautiful. God’s curse upon the Doomsday and the Sot-Weed Factors, upon all who leach and taint and subdivide, coerce and bully and kill. But upon the peacemakers and the conservators, thy blessing and ours, amen.
May 1, 2025
THE YEAR OF THE BRICK continues with a tome from the late, great John Barth who, despite being a known quantity among the people whose opinions I value, still seems under-appreciated, even given the expected death boost his reputation gained last year. I have never disliked a single thing I’ve read from Barth, although I don’t think I’d call any of them essential outside of The Sot-Weed Factor and some of his essays/lectures.
Anyways, on to the brick in question. The Tidewater Tales hurt my wrists and didn’t read quickly, lending itself typically to 30ish pages per day, or closer to 40-50 if I had a chance to bring it with me on a workout. Its pages are of an above-average height and jampacked with words of below-average size, its 17 main sections broken up into multiple mini-chapters each of which tended to be some sort of frame-tale-within-a-frame-tale, as Barth loves to do, and all of this division and categorization is in service of a plot that can be adequately summed up in a single breath: a married couple goes sailing for 2 weeks leading up to the birth of their first children (twins), telling and being told stories along the way.
If you want action, excitement, a complex narrative, you’re on the wrong boat. If you enjoy Barth at his floweriest, futzing around with language and extending scenes beyond their expiration dates, basking in horny descriptions and worshipping his usual gods (Scheherazade, The Chesapeake, etc.), then this is the one for you. It’s almost a prerequisite to have some familiarity with Barth before reading this, not only as a writer but as a person, as it feels more like a chapter in the story of his ever-connected, self-referential catalogue than it does as a standalone novel. In fact, it is essentially the extended director’s cut of its predecessor, Sabbatical: A Romance, which shares its plot to a (slimmer) T and is also a nice, relaxed read. Tidewater is for the select few who love an author enough to let them stay the night and keep you up until the crack of dawn, rambling about the same thing they rambled about last time.
And for my money, it’s his second-best novel behind of course the untouchable Sot-Weed, which could have been the only thing he ever wrote and still would have justified all of the praise that he ever received and will continue to receive as more of us discover and dive deeper into his work. But what a beautiful thing that Sot-Weed wasn’t the only thing he ever wrote; what a miracle that he had so many more stories to tell.
Anyways, on to the brick in question. The Tidewater Tales hurt my wrists and didn’t read quickly, lending itself typically to 30ish pages per day, or closer to 40-50 if I had a chance to bring it with me on a workout. Its pages are of an above-average height and jampacked with words of below-average size, its 17 main sections broken up into multiple mini-chapters each of which tended to be some sort of frame-tale-within-a-frame-tale, as Barth loves to do, and all of this division and categorization is in service of a plot that can be adequately summed up in a single breath: a married couple goes sailing for 2 weeks leading up to the birth of their first children (twins), telling and being told stories along the way.
If you want action, excitement, a complex narrative, you’re on the wrong boat. If you enjoy Barth at his floweriest, futzing around with language and extending scenes beyond their expiration dates, basking in horny descriptions and worshipping his usual gods (Scheherazade, The Chesapeake, etc.), then this is the one for you. It’s almost a prerequisite to have some familiarity with Barth before reading this, not only as a writer but as a person, as it feels more like a chapter in the story of his ever-connected, self-referential catalogue than it does as a standalone novel. In fact, it is essentially the extended director’s cut of its predecessor, Sabbatical: A Romance, which shares its plot to a (slimmer) T and is also a nice, relaxed read. Tidewater is for the select few who love an author enough to let them stay the night and keep you up until the crack of dawn, rambling about the same thing they rambled about last time.
And for my money, it’s his second-best novel behind of course the untouchable Sot-Weed, which could have been the only thing he ever wrote and still would have justified all of the praise that he ever received and will continue to receive as more of us discover and dive deeper into his work. But what a beautiful thing that Sot-Weed wasn’t the only thing he ever wrote; what a miracle that he had so many more stories to tell.
dropped
July 24, 2019Read up to p.103. Look, it's fucking hot, OK?
March 12, 2016
This is a strange one. Simultaneously loose and tight in structure, it works as a sort-of-sequel to Barth's previous novel Sabbatical: A Romance. But where that one gets surprisingly tense and dark in places, this is a much more leisurely told story, with side-trips into what reads like outtakes and further development of themes and stories from Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera. Nothing new here, and Barth is as always a master in making new variations on previous texts.
It's with the sort-of-sequel-stuff that things get a bit complicated. Both this book and Sabbatical: A Romance follow a heterosexual couple working through the (more or less) same troubling issues in their life (writing, pregnancy, their family, the early-80s political climate, their relationship) while sailing the Chesapeake, and both books are told from the viewpoint of the couple by a sort-of-ominisent 1. person plural narrator, though more often then not the things narrated are stories told or recalled by other characters in the novel. Furthermore we are often reminded - again in both books - that what we read are not the characters story, but the characters re-telling of their story in the form of a novel. Furthermore the two coubles are also related through mutual friends, and where Sabbatical: A Romance is more self-contained, The Tidewater Tales let them meet, interact and influence each others stories (and novels) in various ways.
If these kind of meta-textual tricks turn you on (they do me!) then definitely read this, though by all means read Sabbatical: A Romance first. And also be ready for quite a bit of repetition, as various parts of the first novel or retold with slightly new viewpoints in the second one. It's a matter of taste, but again, I never seems to tire of Barth re-telling his old stories once more, just as I never tire of his wonderful prose, and how lovely, sexy and alive he manage to make his characters.
Now, Barth is a very patient storyteller, so what might seem like a pointless digression usually have a compositorial point at some point 300 pages later. That said, The Tidewater Tales errs a bit on the side of looseness, and first half drags quite a bit in places (there are for instance some pretty long stretches of a very bad screenplay-within-the-novel to get through, and even though the writing here seems intentionally bad - and has a point later on - dragging it on for 20+ pages are a bit much.) In the second half things pick up quite a bit, and though definitely not his best book (that remains LETTERS in my opinion, closely followed by Chimera) it still quite unlike most things else out there. (Just remember to read Sabbatical: A Romance first!)
It's with the sort-of-sequel-stuff that things get a bit complicated. Both this book and Sabbatical: A Romance follow a heterosexual couple working through the (more or less) same troubling issues in their life (writing, pregnancy, their family, the early-80s political climate, their relationship) while sailing the Chesapeake, and both books are told from the viewpoint of the couple by a sort-of-ominisent 1. person plural narrator, though more often then not the things narrated are stories told or recalled by other characters in the novel. Furthermore we are often reminded - again in both books - that what we read are not the characters story, but the characters re-telling of their story in the form of a novel. Furthermore the two coubles are also related through mutual friends, and where Sabbatical: A Romance is more self-contained, The Tidewater Tales let them meet, interact and influence each others stories (and novels) in various ways.
If these kind of meta-textual tricks turn you on (they do me!) then definitely read this, though by all means read Sabbatical: A Romance first. And also be ready for quite a bit of repetition, as various parts of the first novel or retold with slightly new viewpoints in the second one. It's a matter of taste, but again, I never seems to tire of Barth re-telling his old stories once more, just as I never tire of his wonderful prose, and how lovely, sexy and alive he manage to make his characters.
Now, Barth is a very patient storyteller, so what might seem like a pointless digression usually have a compositorial point at some point 300 pages later. That said, The Tidewater Tales errs a bit on the side of looseness, and first half drags quite a bit in places (there are for instance some pretty long stretches of a very bad screenplay-within-the-novel to get through, and even though the writing here seems intentionally bad - and has a point later on - dragging it on for 20+ pages are a bit much.) In the second half things pick up quite a bit, and though definitely not his best book (that remains LETTERS in my opinion, closely followed by Chimera) it still quite unlike most things else out there. (Just remember to read Sabbatical: A Romance first!)
Read
April 24, 2016This was going great until about halfway, when with CIA subplot stymied it descended ever further toward the absolute epitome of what, to me, is lame in metafiction – all those cardboard, cute Scheherazade and Don Quixote stories, and a neat deux ex machina resolution that felt like betrayal after so long a wait. Admittedly there were warning signs: the abysmal “Sex Education: Act I”, for eg, nearly stopped me in my tracks, though I forced myself to read it imagining it might have some relevance to the novel entire. Add to this page upon page of flat, repetitive, ungraceful exposition and my impression was of 300 dense, decent pages (centring on the yacht trip, the pregnancy, the writer’s block) exploded to 650 with an assortment of tricks, authorial ticks and distractions.
Here’s the thing: I accept that Barth doesn’t “have the answers”, that he bit off a lot with that whole CIA/Doomsday theme, that maybe he’d written it as far as it could be written; ditto the thematically-related industrial waste subplot (though it ended almost before it began). BUT, dramaturgically speaking (as Barth – or quasi-anti-Barth Peter Sagamore – would say), I feel as if nothing could be more phoney than to implicate brother-in-law Willie Sherritt in both said subplots then to not explore that implication, but instead to subject the reader to “Sex Education” Acts II and III and all those cheap-shot Scheherazade-in-the-20th-Century digressions. To me, The Tidewater Tales seems a clear-cut case of cowardice: by slow degrees big questions are broached, only to be swept away by a deluge of trivia. Which I guess answers Barth’s (or Sagamore’s) question after all: What to do as Doomsday approacheth? Not a damn thing, except tell tall tales to distract ourselves from the inevitable.
As to Sagamore’s commenting on shortcomings in the narrative, that, to me, is transparent bet-hedging: Barth wants to break the rules but doesn’t quite trust his readers to get the joke. Which isn’t to disparage the book’s “meta” qualities wholesale: the idea of Sagamore as minimalist with Doomsday-induced writer’s block trying to find a way to “not write” about Doomsday, for eg, I would have loved to see taken to its conclusion. (IE: Not just the conclusion of the spy story, which conclusion I concede may have been reached, but rather the conclusion of the development-of-the-writer story, rather than the avoidance of said story via sundry Quixote/Scheherazade diversions. Not to mention, what a cop-out, to suggest that the book The Tidewater Tales could in any way but superficially resemble the novel of a recovering minimalist of any variety, let alone Doomsday-silenced! Once Sagamore started jotting down the – resolutely un-minimalist – chapter titles as they appear in Barth’s novel, for me, the careful delineation of Sagamore/Barth collapsed; the novel lost a vital dimension.)
But don’t get me wrong: The Tidewater Tales, for its first half, was both cozy and challenging – a near-perfect blend of edifying and escapist, give or take a wayward “Sex Education” script (which I forgave because I respected the left-turn, and the need of it to negotiate an impasse), which I would gladly have enjoyed for another 300 like pages if those like pages had been forthcoming. On the strength of its first half, then, maybe, it’s some kind of masterpiece, but a masterpiece that doused me in sugared painkiller after splitting my head open. I’d prefer to feel the pain. Severely frustrating.
Here’s the thing: I accept that Barth doesn’t “have the answers”, that he bit off a lot with that whole CIA/Doomsday theme, that maybe he’d written it as far as it could be written; ditto the thematically-related industrial waste subplot (though it ended almost before it began). BUT, dramaturgically speaking (as Barth – or quasi-anti-Barth Peter Sagamore – would say), I feel as if nothing could be more phoney than to implicate brother-in-law Willie Sherritt in both said subplots then to not explore that implication, but instead to subject the reader to “Sex Education” Acts II and III and all those cheap-shot Scheherazade-in-the-20th-Century digressions. To me, The Tidewater Tales seems a clear-cut case of cowardice: by slow degrees big questions are broached, only to be swept away by a deluge of trivia. Which I guess answers Barth’s (or Sagamore’s) question after all: What to do as Doomsday approacheth? Not a damn thing, except tell tall tales to distract ourselves from the inevitable.
As to Sagamore’s commenting on shortcomings in the narrative, that, to me, is transparent bet-hedging: Barth wants to break the rules but doesn’t quite trust his readers to get the joke. Which isn’t to disparage the book’s “meta” qualities wholesale: the idea of Sagamore as minimalist with Doomsday-induced writer’s block trying to find a way to “not write” about Doomsday, for eg, I would have loved to see taken to its conclusion. (IE: Not just the conclusion of the spy story, which conclusion I concede may have been reached, but rather the conclusion of the development-of-the-writer story, rather than the avoidance of said story via sundry Quixote/Scheherazade diversions. Not to mention, what a cop-out, to suggest that the book The Tidewater Tales could in any way but superficially resemble the novel of a recovering minimalist of any variety, let alone Doomsday-silenced! Once Sagamore started jotting down the – resolutely un-minimalist – chapter titles as they appear in Barth’s novel, for me, the careful delineation of Sagamore/Barth collapsed; the novel lost a vital dimension.)
But don’t get me wrong: The Tidewater Tales, for its first half, was both cozy and challenging – a near-perfect blend of edifying and escapist, give or take a wayward “Sex Education” script (which I forgave because I respected the left-turn, and the need of it to negotiate an impasse), which I would gladly have enjoyed for another 300 like pages if those like pages had been forthcoming. On the strength of its first half, then, maybe, it’s some kind of masterpiece, but a masterpiece that doused me in sugared painkiller after splitting my head open. I’d prefer to feel the pain. Severely frustrating.
May 25, 2009
While this book wasn't terrible, it did make me cringe multiple times. It's too clever for its own good, and the ending nearly made me crazy with all of the tidy wrapping up of characters.
This is a story about literally giving birth (to babies) and to birthing or creating stories. Kath and Peter are married, nearly 40, and expecting twins. Kath is 8.5 months pregnant at the outset and every reader knows that the entire story will end once she delivers. Peter is a writer that has been suffering from a block of sorts, when his wife asks him to tell her a story.
This story incorporates Huck Finn, the Odyssey, Don Quixote, 1001 Nights, and a ridiculously cheesy "play" featuring talking eggs and sperm and takes place in someone's uterus with the events of their past and current lives. The characters are totally wealthy yuppies (before "yuppies" existed). The gimmicky nature was just too much for me. Plus, at over 600 pages, I do feel as though I have wasted my time to a certain extent...
This is a story about literally giving birth (to babies) and to birthing or creating stories. Kath and Peter are married, nearly 40, and expecting twins. Kath is 8.5 months pregnant at the outset and every reader knows that the entire story will end once she delivers. Peter is a writer that has been suffering from a block of sorts, when his wife asks him to tell her a story.
This story incorporates Huck Finn, the Odyssey, Don Quixote, 1001 Nights, and a ridiculously cheesy "play" featuring talking eggs and sperm and takes place in someone's uterus with the events of their past and current lives. The characters are totally wealthy yuppies (before "yuppies" existed). The gimmicky nature was just too much for me. Plus, at over 600 pages, I do feel as though I have wasted my time to a certain extent...
February 25, 2015
I read this book when I was 17; I was going through a kind of a kick, from García Marquez to Grass to Rushdie to "Chimera" and "Giles Goat-Boy" and this. I remember loving it; I remember thinking that it was chock-full of genuine affection and actual love. I still have the copy of "Tidewater Tales" I had read back in 1987, but I'm afraid of how yellowed its pages and emotions may have become over the intervening years. I loved this book so much that I wrote a fan letter to John Barth (though that was inspired more by reading "Letters") and Mr. Barth wrote me back, from the deck of his sailboat as it turns out. At any rate, I want to read this again: I am in need of that warmth and affection that bathed me so, and that I had taken for granted, in my youth.
May 27, 2021
Got up to 450 and yes, I feel comfortable rating this. When I realized I didn’t want to spend Memorial Day weekend slogging I knew it was time to put it down. Some of Barth’s most human stuff but also some of his most tedious. And Barth does tedious like no other author.
February 25, 2025
Then 'n' Now
Read it way, way back when it first came out. I liked it then; I don't think I'd like it now.
Read it way, way back when it first came out. I liked it then; I don't think I'd like it now.
February 27, 2015
I used to read this book every summer while vacationing on Chincoteague Island. I loved it. Gradually, though, it seemed a little too precious for me, and I found myself skipping large sections. I guess I outgrew it.
October 25, 2008
I had high hopes with the premise of the book, but was disappointed to find a rambling book that seemed to be an experiment in writing.
July 6, 2009
Barth's most optimistic, creative, life-affirming novel, a rarity in postmodern fiction. One of my favorites.
January 15, 2013
An absolute feast of language and literary allusion.
January 24, 2023
Just finished this one and it started with so much promise. It is quite a bit like Chimera I think, it's about stories and like a million other ideas. Midway through Barth's kind of self-satisfied pomposity really begins to get tiring - he's brilliant and funny and ribald - we get it - but also very loudly proclaiming his, uh, post-modern (?) intelligence; a chapter title longer than the chapter, plays in the middle of fiction, etc. If it weren't for the location, the Chesapeake, I don't know if I would have made it the almost 700 pages. There's some great stuff here, and it is funny, but maybe I don't like John Barth?
May 14, 2017
THE TIDEWATER TALES is a massive outpouring, winding and skittering like one of the many Maryland rivers contained therein. Though it is high-minded and virtuosic literature, it ultimately could be said to celebrate above all the simple life lived well (though certainly lived in and around stories). Barth is extremely self-aware, and self-reflexively jokes within the work about the work's status as "postmodern" literature. Certainly when I think of postmodernity I think of such self-reflexivity. I also think of the archive plunder - the appropriation of established forms, genres, vernacular modes, and fictional (or not) personages. Where THE TIDEWATER TALES perhaps goes further than the best works of its kind, however, is in the realm of intertextuality. It is not just the stories of Scheherazade, Don Quixote, and Odysseus that orbit in and around this novel, but also Barth's preceding works. TIDEWATER is engaged in frank and open (often deeply nourishing) dialogue w/ CHIMERA and SABBATICAL (and even THE SOT-WEED FACTOR to a lesser degree). These past works could be said to be mimetic of the many ports of call along the Chesapeake that Barth and his characters endlessly navigate. It is only this far into a literary career (TIDEWATER was published thirty-one years after his first book) that a writer can truly start plumbing his own mythosphere to such resonant effect. This is definitely a novel that will sing loudest to those who have already spent some time in Mr. Barth's baroque schooner. It contains books but is also opened up onto a world of books. Mr. Barth's world is like some thought experiment involving infinite Matryoshka dolls stacked inward eternally. Again, however, this is a book that wants to keep us coming back to what also matters (and ultimately matters, I believe Barth would insist, more): our lives lived in proximity to one another, as we try to be and to have good.
August 17, 2019
This is one of my top 3 Barth books behind my favorite The Sot-Weed Factor and probably a tie with The Floating Opera. Giles Goat-Boy might be unrankable, but is in my top 5 along with sentimental favorite the Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.
Barth made me fall in love with Maryland's Eastern Shore and dream of being able to one day have a boat and sail up and down the Chesapeake (I've been there many times, rode on a boat there once, but have not yet been able to buy one and take a year off to sail - or learn to for that matter).
His storytelling is as near perfect as it comes. This was simply enjoyable for me to read.
Barth made me fall in love with Maryland's Eastern Shore and dream of being able to one day have a boat and sail up and down the Chesapeake (I've been there many times, rode on a boat there once, but have not yet been able to buy one and take a year off to sail - or learn to for that matter).
His storytelling is as near perfect as it comes. This was simply enjoyable for me to read.
April 9, 2024
A far cry from the wonder that is The Sot-Weed Factor. This one just meanders and meanders and is way too clever for its own good. Cleverness should at least be, I don't know, more clever, I guess. Or something. Funnier, how about. I have no idea what this book is supposed to be about, other than it being about, like, books, man, it's a story about telling stories, ya see, and blah blah blah. Reading this I can see why people hate post-modernists. If this is their idea of a good time, egads. Yes, Barth is some kind of genius word-smith, but what's the point if he doesn't actually tell a compelling story? With any compelling characters?
August 20, 2008
I'd have given this one six, or maybe ten stars - out of 5 - if possbile. It's definitely not for the passive or distracted reader, and sometimes required re-reading sentences or paragraphs even while paying attention. I've read a number of really good books - more that I've listed here - but none better.
March 6, 2015
I am rereading the first one hundred pages over and over trying to make some sense out of convoluted sentences and ideas. I almost get it,but not clearly. Names change at will, so I am not always sure who is doing what but one thing I do understand and that is the geography. Thank heavens for that.
February 10, 2011
Too tedious for me. At risk of being called a chauvinist, it is a book best for females.
January 5, 2024
When I began this books I was really struck by how similar it felt in writing style to Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls get the Blues), Dave Eggers and some other books I read in the 80s. The author/narrator is so self-conscious and there is a stream-of consciousness aspect to it too. I started reading up on Barth and Post-modernism and Metafiction (the author is writing about an author writing about..)
The book fascinated me, in part because while it is fiction, it is about a part of the world I know very well--there were landmarks, rivers, houses and personalities that I can find every day in my backyard. Even my kids' school is in the book, lightly veiled. Barth obviously knows his way around Talbot County and the Eastern Shore; there are conversations in this book that could only happen here--and are almost predictable here....
Tidewater Tales is hard to follow and takes a lot of concentration. Odysseus, Sherheradze and Don Quioxte wander in an out of the novel with their own modernized simultaneous plot lines. And then there is the CIA/Doomsday stuff which was really hard to keep straight. The writing is so dense that I found I could be reading for 30 minutes and only get through 10 pages--and normally I am a fast reader.
I would recommend it especially to locals, but with the understanding that it is not for a casual reader. It takes some concentration to get through
The book fascinated me, in part because while it is fiction, it is about a part of the world I know very well--there were landmarks, rivers, houses and personalities that I can find every day in my backyard. Even my kids' school is in the book, lightly veiled. Barth obviously knows his way around Talbot County and the Eastern Shore; there are conversations in this book that could only happen here--and are almost predictable here....
Tidewater Tales is hard to follow and takes a lot of concentration. Odysseus, Sherheradze and Don Quioxte wander in an out of the novel with their own modernized simultaneous plot lines. And then there is the CIA/Doomsday stuff which was really hard to keep straight. The writing is so dense that I found I could be reading for 30 minutes and only get through 10 pages--and normally I am a fast reader.
I would recommend it especially to locals, but with the understanding that it is not for a casual reader. It takes some concentration to get through
September 27, 2021
8 ½ mo pregnant (with twins), Katherine ‘sets a task’ for her muse blocked author husband Peter, ‘Take us sailing.’ They spend the next 14 days telling tales and listening to stories from each other, their families, friends, ex-spouses, and lovers while wandering the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Characters and authors from classic literature are interlocked to the stories with current events and news headlines of late June 1980. The multiple plots, a CIA/KGB murder conspiracy, intra-family drama, a toxic waste dump/environmental concerns, etc. keep the readers grounded in the present while the references to literature let our minds roam. The daunting 655-page narration is driven by the playful banter of our main characters and all plots are neatly wrapped up in the end.
I read this book not long after it was first published in 1987. I remember enjoying the stories, but I didn’t remember how complicated the multiple plots and characters made the reading. This time around, it took me 50-60 pages before I settled into the wordplay and cross talk that give this book life. If you’re up for an epic I would recommend picking up this magnum opus.
I read this book not long after it was first published in 1987. I remember enjoying the stories, but I didn’t remember how complicated the multiple plots and characters made the reading. This time around, it took me 50-60 pages before I settled into the wordplay and cross talk that give this book life. If you’re up for an epic I would recommend picking up this magnum opus.
Read
December 7, 2020Great book, took me back to those uncertain Eighties, loved the historical fictional characters that populate the novel. I enjoyed the wandering of the upper Chesapeake, I recommended it to my sailing friends.
May 7, 2021
It had been a while since reading a Barth book, so it took me a minute to get into the flow of things. But once in, wow, I thoroughly enjoyed the read.
And all the allusions! And all the allusions coming to life!
And nakedness!
And all the allusions! And all the allusions coming to life!
And nakedness!
June 18, 2022
Tricky one for me to review, while I enjoyed much of it, and was glad I stayed the course with it, I found too much of it a bit self satisfied. I can see why some reviewers give it 5 stars, and some sections of it have stayed with me.
August 14, 2018
Couldn't get through the whole thing but enjoyed the unusual narrative voice and of course the local setting. This would be a good book to try again in winter to remind myself of summertime.
July 2, 2020
Long, dance, and delightful throughout.
February 2, 2021
Amazing stories while cruising the upper Chesapeake Bay.
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