In a novel [Letters] that takes many risks, the identity of the correspondents is the biggest risk of all. They are all figures from Barth's previous fiction…. [Even] though the letters generate their own energy and the correspondents develop their own lives, the choice of the correspondents still retains a coterie effect…. The device does, to be sure, expand two conceits which, now and then, enter the minds of all readers of fiction. The first is that playful act in which one rearranges characters, placing Becky Sharp in Swann's Way or Huckleberry Finn in The Wings of the Dove. Barth's fictions are very different from one another; and thus characters from each of them, placed in the same work, make a collage which is startling and amusing. The second conceit is that equally playful act in which one imagines the lives of characters after the book is finished...