The night of the dinner, Barth had on a black beret, worn at a jaunty angle upon his bald crown, and looked just like John Barth. He made the rounds to each table, and when he took a seat at ours, he talked wittily about hot-air balloons, which was just the sort of thing you’d expect John Barth to talk about. As he charmingly held court (unlike a lot of writers, he was very good at talking), I was thinking about how weird it was that John Barth was seated right there, performing for us. (Who were we, relative to him? Who was I?) Here was the novelist emeritus who once stood at the vanguard of American postmodern fiction, a truly innovative artist who had produced an original, hilarious body of work (although in truth a lot of it was also pretty bad), and still it wasn’t enough. Each book is always a starting over, for every writer. I was thinking then about how I had always been so terrified of this line from “Lost in the Funhouse”: “There ought to be a button you could push to end your life absolutely without pain; disappear in a flick, like turning out a light,” because someone who could write that was someone who knew a lot about despair, and I was thinking about how Barth, with his jauntily angled beret perched upon that great big bald crown, was being reintroduced to whippersnappers such as myself, and about how we all become self-parodies in the end, and about how the whole Barth project concerning the internal problems of narrative in literary fiction maybe didn’t even seem all that pertinent anymore.

Barth wrote a short “review” of Coming Soon!!! for Esquire. At a later date, someone at his publishing house said to me with a weary sigh that his piece in the magazine was the only good review the book got.