The weaving of different stories occurs more through curious echoes and cross-references than through comprehensible relations. Barth once again has his own defense ready in the words of Lady Amherst:
The world is richer in associations than in meanings, and it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.
The associations in Letters, however, come too thick, and it's a matter of chance which one your brain happens to pick out at any moment. As sheaves of pages pass by, Barth concentrates these associations in several arbitrary subjects: the War of 1812, which somehow prefigures a Second American Revolution; the decline of the profession of letters; the Maryland shore, scene of most of the action; the waning of the Indian tribes; others too numerous to mention. Except for the fleeting pleasure of realizing Barth is up to something, these associations offer the attentive reader nothing but work, and the lazy, nothing at all.
The real promise Barth holds for the patient reader is not this lie about meaningful associations but the endless cleverness he applies to the stuff of language, his individual words and sentences. At times this connoisseur of puns and multiple entendres can be seen doing proud headstands behind his latest verbal tricks. Without straining too hard or setting his sights on the outrageous, he usually finds just the odd phrasing, the curious reference to spark laughter. He describes Reg Prinz, a movie director filming one of Barth's novels during Letters:
(He) is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht's and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose's phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation...
More often than not, however, these nuggets of well-proportioned wit are isolated, self-contained, and have no need for the monstrous superstructure around them. Barth could have--and has--written wonderful short stories or brief novels with such material.
He didn't, though; he wrote this bloat, and he tells us why over and over again in the course of it. (In fact, if you cut out all the self-conscious justifications for the denseness and length of Letters, it would probably become both readable and manageable.)
To be a novelist in 1969 is, I agree, a bit like being in the passenger railway business in the age of the jumbo jet: our dilapidated rolling stock creaks over the weed-grown right-of-ways, carrying four winos, six Viet Nam draftees, three black welfare families, two nuns, and one incorrigible railway buff, ever less conveniently, between the crumbling Art Deco cathedrals where once paused the gleaming Twentieth Century Limited.
You might have trouble filling out the whole of this miniature allegory, but that's undoubtedly Barth in the corner, playing with his toy trains. The great conservative, the practitioner of a lost art, the bearer of the torch--so Barth justifies his extravagances.
IF YOU LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls it "an epidemic rage for reenactment." Andrews draws up a detailed schedule of the events that led up to his first decision to commit suicide, and realizes he's reliving it all, and heading in the same direction. Each generation in the exhaustive family history of the Cook/Burlingame clan spends the first half of its life undoing its parents' work and the second half undoing its parents' work and the second half undoing its own. Jacob Horner is either performing in or direction (it's unclear) a play called Der Wiedertraum ("the Repeat Dream"), which reenacts his adulterous affair with the wife of a fellow inmate of the Remobilization Clinic. And so it goes, over and over again.
Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort of literary autism. That's it--the burden of the past: not a roster of great literary forebears but the author's own bibliography. Barth is getting older, and he hasn't found his Theme. Letters is his middle-age-crisis objectified into a monstrosity. No one can fault Barth for wasting a decade of his life on it, if he just had to get it off his chest. But it's the kind of book a more discreet author would bury in his basement, for posthumous publication alone.