In his lengthy buildup to the first of 11 short stories, virtually all reprinted from publications like Granta and TriQuarterly, postmodernist John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor) circles obsessively around the Sept. 11 attacks, worrying that "The End Of The World As We (Americans) Knew It" might render his story-light, wordplay-heavy anthology The Book Of Ten Nights And A Night irrelevant. His intended introduction, a "sportive extended invocation to the Storyteller's Muse," rescues him from his own insecurities, as he begins describing how it might have gone, and the muse herself responds. Before a single page has gone by, Barth's alter ego (variously described as "Graybard," "Imagination," "Narrator," and so forth) and the muse, which he names WYSIWYG (after the acronym "what you see is what you get"), are engaged in tangled wordplay and foreplay. Nearly 50 pages later, Barth coyly gives in to his own blandishments and begins his first "story"—a description-rich vignette first published in 1960—but by that point, it seems like an afterthought.
So it goes with much of Ten Nights And A Night, which plays off The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights) by establishing "the relevance of Irrelevance"; Scheherazade's story-spinning in the shadow of death apparently pre-echoes Barth's decision to re-publish his own clever but windy tales even after The End Of The World. Ten of Barth's 11 stories were written well before Sept. 11, but most have an appropriately post-apocalyptic depressed lassitude. Between installments, Graybard and WYSIWYG discuss the autumnal tone while bantering, drinking, and screwing; their circular conversations blend in well with the actual stories, in which more Barth surrogates (aging professors, stymied writers, and, above all, characters fascinated by connections, coincidence, lists, and wordplay) express their anomie and aging contentment alike by burying themselves in the sprawling associative minutiae of topics ranging from genealogy to architecture.
But in spite of WYSIWYG's puppeted assurances, the irrelevant—along with the merely busy, empty, self-referential, self-adulatory, and distracting—still seems irrelevant. And there's a lot of irrelevance in Ten Nights And A Night, which packs in motifs in huge bundled piles, from Barth's day-by-day Sept. 11 news updates to his lusty descriptions of his idylls with his metaphorical, metaphysical paramour. The book is crowded and complicated to a fault, but Barth's zillion cotton-candy conceits simply add up to a single lengthy justification for a collection of old work. It's nice that Barth-as-muse is willing to grant Barth-as-writer the right to be irrelevant, but the whole process deems the reader's judgment and presence insignificant. Accordingly, readers might as well leave Barth alone in the happy, insular paradise he's painted for himself, and himself alone.