First Volley: Fiction Anemic's BASS review of John Barth's Toga Party

It's taken me a while to comment on John Barth's Toga Party, the second story in BASS. In fact, I was going to make some initial comments, but I knew if I did I would be commenting on something that was building up to surprising ending.

Toga Party tells the tale of an older, upper-middle class couple, Dick and Sue, going to a toga party at the house of a neighbor in their retirement community.

At first, I had a hard time getting into this story. John Barth has a character go through an opening rant that was like trying to read with the television on really loud. After reading the clause-dense Pa's Darling by Louis Auchincloss, the first story in BASS, I thought John Barth's story was going to have a similar theme of rich people complaining in an unironic way about how bad their life. Just this time, set in the 21st century.

The first half of the story goes into great detail about the soul searching Dick and Sue do after the death of a friend's wife and their own looking into their wills and end of life arrangements. Growing old gracefully is mired by health problems and life insurance/investment firm legalese that takes the experience of life out of dying.

The story dramatically picks when the reader gets to the toga party. The setting is just after Hurricane Katrina so the toga party seems less like a send up of Animal House, but more like a real Roman bacchanal. Barth's characters may be attending the party in bed-sheets and have cell phones, but there is a something very Nero-esque going on as the Bush administration ignores the plight of hurricane ravaged New Orleans residents and male party-goers eat grapes from the décolletage of their spouses. Dick and Sue are so desensitized that they can’t experience the decline of their own lives. Part of it is nature, but part of it is their own fault of keeping up in an upper-class retirement community. They can only live after a widowed friend’s desperate act leads them to take one last stab at living their lives their way.

One part of the story that rang false to me was Dick’s unfamiliarity with Animal House or what Et tu Brute? means. While part of me thinks it’s the writer’s attempt to show the main character’s shallowness or unfamiliarity with pop culture, I wonder if the writer is trying to indicate that a bigger medical issue is going (dementia? Alzheimer’s?). These just seem like too common in the American mindscape to be ignored.

This story isn’t perfect. As I got into the story, I thought of someone I knew who wouldn't read The Great Gatsby: he had already passed the stage of life that the characters were in, so he wouldn't be able to sympathize with them. As a person in her early 30's, I can understand the concern of getting wills together and such, but not seven-plus pages worth of it in a short-story. I felt like Barth could have made the story a little shorter and still had it be as interesting.

Overall, I thought it was good. This isn't a story I would find myself picking up again to lovingly re-read, but it restored my hope in BASS after last week.