Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk
To Past Reviews Index
Back to Last Page
Title/Author

The Tidewater Tales

John Barth

Average Review Rating Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)
Book Details

Publisher : The Johns Hopkins University Press

Published : 1997

Copyright : John Barth 1987

ISBN-10 : PB 0-8018-5556-X
ISBN-13 : PB 978-0-8018-5556-6

Publisher's Write-Up

"Tell me a story…" Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore, 8½ months pregnant, is a blue-blooded library scientist and founding mother of the American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling. Her husband Peter, 8½ months nervous, is a blue-collar storyteller with a penchant for brevity. Sailing in the Chesapeake Bay, they tell each other tales to break the writer's block handed Peter by his Muse, to ease the weight of Katherine's pregnancy, to entertain, and to enlighten. Along with their stories, we learn of the Bay itself - past and present. The beloved Chesapeake, where young Peter once indulged his Huck Finn fantasy, is in danger of becoming what he dubs a moral cesspool; where nature is in a losing struggle with man; where the hallowed Deniston School for Girls is being pressured by the CIA to sell land to the Soviet embassy; and where the old Sagamore homestead might or might not be the newest espionage station on the shoreline.

'The Tidewater Tales takes the form of a narrative encyclopaedia, a pre-natal crash course in the politics, social life, literature, history, and mythology of late-twentieth century America. It sits on the map of modern American fiction as a gigantic memorable construction.'

Jonathan Raban, Times Literary Supplement

'What is so moving about The Tidewater Tales is its frequent and frequently incidental richness as a love story - marital, filial, domestic - and also in its love of a place, of a country, even as place and country are scarred by depredation.'

William Pritchard, New York Times Book Review
Column Ends

space

Reader Reviews

Why not Submit a Review your own Review for this book?

Review by John Alwyine-Mosely (010608) Rating (9/10)

Review by John Alwyine-Mosely
Rating 9/10
Peter is a working class successful writer who has become blocked and so begs his well heeled wife (Katherine), who is 8½ months pregnant, to set him a task. She does, which is to tell stories as they sail around the Chesapeake Bay (a 200 mile long estuary on the Virginia and Maryland coastlines) in their boat called Story. During which we discover how they fell in love in the 60's but not met up until the 70's and why they are having babies now as they hit 40. But this is only one of three other love stories in the novel. One is the love of landscape and the other is of sailing. Both of which are powerfully evoked throughout the novel. Their love story, landscape and sailing are then effectively linked to their families. Hers being local old money who have shaped the land since before the USA was founded and his being boat builders who have shaped access to the water since coming over in the 19th century.

Katherine's family are open, generous, friendly and sophisticated so accept and support the whims of Peter and Katherine to sail around the Bay. Likewise Peter shy and intense and Katherine open and bright are deep friends and in love so we like the characters and join in the physicality evoked by the writing. However, these are but three of several strands in the novel, two others are a political thriller and an eco-mystery. The first explores the CIA-KGB spy games as the SALT talks dirty tricks play out in the local area. The second looks at the environmental damage being done by illegal dumping. Both story lines are linked firmly with Katharine's ex husband and her charming but wastrel brother but not as you expect.

But all this are themes for the real focus of the novel which is about the art and mystery of writing and story telling. So over the 14 days of sailing we move in and out of the stories of Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, 1001 nights of Arabian Tales, Odyssey as they shape and are shaped by the love story, landscape and sailing. We meet the narrators as characters finishing their own stories and shaping the novel as we do as reader-characters. This means that the narrative moves through a whole range of formats (plays, short essays, monologues, puns, wordplay etc) and genres (love story, social comedy, thriller, family saga, etc) with us and the unborn babies as narrator commentators along with the characters who know they are in a story. And we know their fates outside the story itself.

Don't expect a quick read as its 655 pages and small print but do expect an intellectual tour de force and a page turner for what is mediation on writing that races along driven by the reader's identification with Peter's writers block, and their immediate parenthood while the multi-layer story entertains and stretches. Clearly a banquet that lingers in the memory when many beans on toast novels have been long forgotten… so highly recommended.
John Alwyine-Mosely (1st June 2008)

Back to Top of Page
Column Ends

space