Click to a Toga Party
Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 11. A couple of months ago I read a short story in Contemporary Fiction called “Click,” written by John Barth. (You can find it here , with tiny variations from the version I read.) It was an odd reading experience: I kept admiring the brilliance of the narrative, while wishing it would end that very instant. Yes, there were plenty of funny moments. Yes, there were insightful comments, about the action of the story and also fiction itself. Yes, there were very clever choices of words and wordplays (sometimes verging on pedantry). But it was sinuous, exceedingly rich, choppy. I found myself laughing and thumb-twirling in equal measures. The plot of “Click” is real simple: a couple (Mark and Valerie) have a big fight because of their very different personalities, and then they make up. Their process of making up is mediated by a webpage they visit in which there is a hypertext narrative called “The Hypertextuality of Everyday Lif...