[Barth's] awareness of the right word and manipulations of "voice" are brilliant and sometimes devastating. Barth's wit—his word-play, his verbal parody, his subtle ridicule of everything pretentious, banal, ignorant, pedestrian—is clearly inseparable from his basic fictional impulses. The word "flabbergasting" is appropriate to Barth himself as fiction writer, but it is not appropriate to me as fiction writer. On the other hand, my own heavier cadences and "darker" voice—"coldness, ruthless determination to expose, ridicule, attack"—do not seem to me to be at all appropriate to Barth….

If Barth and I are not concerned with realism, not even with psychological realism, nonetheless we are both working with psychic substance or substance of the mind, are both starting with the materials of psychic or cerebral derangement in our efforts to arrive at "aesthetic bliss." Barth's imagination is in fact a kind of higher-fi system out of...