This is a favorite of mine - the tale of Proteus especially. ( )

Barth is one of those writers who seems like he can do anything. He's a dangerous one for beginning writers to get into since his work comes off as so effortless. He makes writing an 800 page historical comedy about an obscure poet seem like it just poured out of his head onto the page. Imitators eventually learn how hard it is to be another John Barth, but usually not without going through a lot of pain and self-abasement (and plenty of tortured prose) that could have otherwise been avoided. "Funhouse" is as fine a short story collection, one of the finest in fact, but it's a hard drug to kick.

The stories run about as wide a gamete as possible, from the various stories about the birth and development of the child Ambrose (two of them fairly straightforward, one of them a postmodern masterpiece) to the various stories about the mechanics of telling a story, along with a few scattered odds and ends, particularly the opening story, a single line spread over two pages that reads "Once upon a time there was a story that began..." The insidious implication being that the next line will be the first one repeated and so on for infinity. Despite its disparate nature, the book is more of a piece than a scattered collection. Barth's themes of life, growth, development and the need to tell stories are slowly brought together into a single idea: that life is a story, and living is the telling. Telling stories is hence an affirmation of life.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) ( )