Book Review: On With The Story, by John Barth

I can't remember when I've enjoyed a book less than On With The Story, by John Barth. You know it's not a good sign when you start a review that way. For a short book (257pp), it has taken me months to complete. Now to be fair, I'm not a big fan of short stories, but I'm willing to give them a chance.

The premise of this collection of short stories is that a married couple is on vacation or something, and is telling each other (or one is telling the other) a bunch of stories to pass the time during a thunderstorm. I think that's the premise. It seemed as though were written by an academic: pretentious and with many a GRE word, vacuous "stories" strung together with content-free banter segments. If that weren't irritating enough, none of the characters were sympathetic; that is, none of them were drawn (more like "sketched" like a stick figure) interestingly enough for the reader to care about them at all. This is a book of banality - overwhelming banality - with the possible exception of a certain criminal described towards the end of the book.

I'm so glad to have finished this book - for no other reason than to trash it to my readers. Now, the reason I picked it up i nthe first place was that I'd read something of his in a literature class several years ago which I recalled enjoying at that time. Word to the wise, if you enjoy all those aspects of which I've described above as not enjoying; that is, if you are a dyed-in-the-wool academic sort, who happens to be teaching a literature class on short stories, you might indeed get something out of this book.