In the wake of disaster, a storyteller resumes his work

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories
By John Barth
Houghton Mifflin, 295 pp., $24

Here's a typical John Barth paragraph:

"(Sez you, comes back the ghost of Tucker Jim. For even as there are touchstone images that the narrative use of far from exhausts; that when we believed we had done themwith not only continue to float or prowl upon their uncomprehended way but return, return to tease or spook us, so there are stories, Reader -- this themamong -- that hopefully substitute the sonority of closure for the thing itself; that may sound done but are not; that, like an open parenthesis, without properly ending at least for the cross-fingered present stop."

It would not be unfair to say that, if you find the above unclosured lines cerebrally stimulating, you will likewise enjoy Barth's 16th offering, as he has determined to call it: "The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories." Author (not to be confused with the person who penned the above paragraph, or even the constantly evolving human soul writing this one) of this review -- if that is what we agree to term it -- could go on and on in this artery, but finds such thinkery, after the initial jolt of affection for his own imitative cleverness, exhausting. Even annoying. Which is what he also finds "The Book of Ten Nights and a Night." Though his feelings are more nuanced than that.

All right. What seems to be happening here is this: Barth wanted to collect some of his previously published stories under one cover. He's a winner of the National Book Award, author of such fondly read works as "Giles Goat-Boy" and "The Sot-Weed Factor," a true innovator in American letters, and a veteran writing teacher, now retired. Many authors in this situation, abetted by their editors, would be satisfied simply to cross out a word here and there, throw in a fresh tale or two, call it a book, make a little cash, and move on. Barth, to his credit, isn't.

Part of the reason for this -- if you can believe his mentally hyperactive, quirky, brilliant, and ultimately likable narrator -- is that the shock and horror of Sept. 11, 2001, seemed to him, for a time at least, to render storytelling itself irrelevant. Barth calls it "TEOTWAW(A)KI": The End of the World as We (Americans) Knew It.

People in other professions will remember similar feelings. On that awful day, and the awful days that immediately followed, it sometimes seemed as though the only legitimate work in life was to be a firefighter, a policeman, or a black beret heading off to eliminate the Taliban.

Barth eventually went back to work, as we all did. But the possibility of his work's irrelevance haunts the pages here, making his already self-conscious and convoluted style especially more so . . . as he might put it.

He deals with the specter of irrelevance by inventing a muse for his narrator, a female incarnation he calls "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get). In the interstices between stories, narrator and his muse engage in inventive sex and lively conversation -- about 9/11, among other things. They ponder Homer, Dante, Scheherazade, Boccaccio, fishing around in the waters of literary history for examples of writers who did their work, not just in spite of the world's awfulness, but because of it. In the end, for her efforts, WYSIWYG even earns her own biographical story. Like the older ones collected here, it is a deft, postmodern account, pocked (some will say marred) with self-conscious reflection.

Barth's characters are almost always teachers or writers, with the occasional therapist or investment counselor thrown in for good measure. They've been lucky in life, and know it -- not much tragedy, no addiction, money troubles, unwanted unemployment, or chronic illness. Barth is a master at depicting the little details of everyday life, and the twists, turns, tilts, small exultations or slow erosion of domestic love. His use of language is a joy to behold ("concrete sidewalks dapple like old saltines"), and even readers annoyed by the continual interruption ("First-person aside to Patient Gentle Reader") will find themselves amused by his cleverness and warmed by his sincere -- if sometimes overly self-involved -- struggle to be absolutely honest.

In the Sixth Night's story, "The Big Shrink," best of the bunch, Barth ingeniously turns the remarks of a pontificating host on their side and calls up, in a few lines, the sagging fortunes of a once-strong marriage. But those moments of poignancy are rare. Barth's work is more about brain than heart, and might be seen as ancestral to Quentin Tarantino's. There is the same insistence on tugging at the reader's or viewer's sleeve while the story is being told, or shown. As if to say: Don't look at the characters, look at me; check out these tricks and references; let's laugh up our sleeves together at the whole idea of telling a neat tale. The important difference is that Barth's work is kinder. Even when the wordsmanship annoys, there is something thoughtful, true, and likable in these stories, something human, hopeful, vulnerable. And after The End of the World as We Knew It, that might be all a writer can offer.

Roland Merullo is at work on his fifth novel.