[John Barth's] first novel since Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is, as publishers like to say, an event. Letters … is a big event, almost half a million words, 864 pages, seven years in its making….

Be forewarned, then: Here is yet another fiction whose principal purpose is to regard itself, to finger (seldom lovingly, often contemptuously) its own artifices, to play the venerable modernist game of Seems and Is. In keeping with his preoccupation with what he has called "exhausted" literary forms, the "used-upness" of, say, the picaresque novel, which he exploited and parodied in The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth has chosen to fabricate an epistolary novel.

Barth's Letters is nothing if not implausible. Five of its seven correspondents are characters or the descendants of characters from Barth's previous fictions…. A sixth character is called "the Author" or "John Barth."…

The "John Barth" of Letters is an autobiographical fragment, or figment…. Letters is...