John Barth has seen art as the world "elsewhere," the better world where nothing disappears. Letters is his billet doux to literature and his plea to his own creations to return the gift of life…. Barth attempts a kind of self-renewal through retrieving and repossessing his fictional offspring and his youth as a writer. Wading through the plots and people of his past novels, Barth seems to search for some fresh emotion. Although he fails to find it, his search is itself a wily and powerful statement of Letters's best subject: aesthetic ambition.

Of our contemporaries, only Barth has looked to art for the key to life. In the past, his characters have outwitted even suicidal despair by seeing themselves as storytellers, by weaving fictions that conceal their troubles. They seem to find the magic words, the abracadabras, that permit them not to distinguish style from lifestyle...