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A review by swineberg
Chimera by John Barth
5.0
In this house we LOVE a novel that’s a postmodern and metafictional mythological adaptation; that’s comedic and horny and yearning; that’s alternately self-aggrandizing and self-defeating but altogether dazzling and unique. It’s heady and by its own admission something that many people won’t finish, a “beastly fiction, ill-proportioned, full of longueurs, lumps, lacunae, a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor.” But hot damn was I impressed with it, and I can’t believe that John Barth has faded into relative obscurity. And I’m not just saying that because of how Maryland-specific his writing is.
A note that your mileage may vary with the very 1974 “progressive” sex and gender politics, but other than a regrettably lisping queer man near the end (he insists that he isn’t lisping because he’s gay, he’s just lisping, which…oy) the book really seeks to interrogate the catalogue of rapes, machismo, and disposable supporting women that makes up our myths.
A note that your mileage may vary with the very 1974 “progressive” sex and gender politics, but other than a regrettably lisping queer man near the end (he insists that he isn’t lisping because he’s gay, he’s just lisping, which…oy) the book really seeks to interrogate the catalogue of rapes, machismo, and disposable supporting women that makes up our myths.