Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is John Barth, whose new novel, Coming Soon, is published by Houghton Mifflin.

John Barth is my favorite living American writer.

His masterpieces include the floating opera, the

hotweed factor, lost in the fun house, letters, the tidewater tales, the list goes on and on.

I attended his classes when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo,

and he shaped my aesthetic sense. Last week, we began a discussion of his career.

Now we enter, in a sense, the terra incognita,

because for Barth's first five, six books,

enormous attention was paid to these books.

It grew book by book, and you only needed to look at the next

Barth book to find the answers to the questions the previous books had raised. Suddenly,

though, new things started to occur in the books that fascinated me, because, you know, I felt capable of going to the terror, when suddenly books by twinned pairs of able and inept narrators began to arrive,

and they didn't seem to carry with them to my mind the baggage, say, of Flaubert's thoughts about Bouvard and Pekouche.

These were not satires of the bourgeois.

There was suddenly a fascination with how life should not be lived and not be narrated.

I'm thinking now of the comparison between Perseud and Belarfon, between the hero of sabbatical,

...