The End of the Road: John Barth dies at 93

April 3, 2024 5:12 AM

John Barth, author of books like Sot-Weed Factor, Lost in the Funhouse, Letters and Tidewater Tales, has died in a Florida hospice facility. He was 93.

Barth had a long career and indulged his imagination in various literary experiments. Though dated in their treatment of women and minorities, his first two novels (published in the late 1950s) were fairly straightforward parodies of existential novels: in The Floating Opera the protagonist is beset by feelings of meaninglessness but decides against suicide because the act would be equally meaningless. Take that, Camus.

After that he published the two novels that were the first flowering of his exuberant style: Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy. These sprawling works are full of narrative tricks, satire, wordplay, often juvenile humor and literary and mythological references. They remain his most celebrated works, and are undeniably entertaining.

Barth was the epitome of a literary author. He was always engaged with world mythology and the phenomenon of storytelling.

posted by Fritz Langwedge (20 comments total)

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posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:37 AM on April 3

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My relationship with Barth is complicated. His work was really important to me in my late teens and twenties; later, as I grew up and cultural conversation shifted, I began to find his smutty dirty-old-man energy embarrassing, and his regular, if ironic, deployment of racial caricatures exhausting.

His work, in retrospect, was laser-targeted at who I was at that time in my life. "For whom is the funhouse fun?" he asked, over and over, and the answer turned out to be highly suspect; after all, nothing only men like is cool.

Oh but his funhouses were fun, for me, so much fun and so for me, and I still carry in my bones the feeling of the powerful emotional experiences his work could deliver.
posted by longtime_lurker at 6:08 AM on April 3 [17 favorites]

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posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 6:18 AM on April 3

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posted by kyrademon at 6:25 AM on April 3

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posted by Dr. Wu at 7:23 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

Barth could be funnier and more interesting than most experimental literature of the time. And yeah, "of the time" is a thing here.

(For the curious, on YT a film version of The End of The Road (with Stacey Keach, adapted script by Terry Southern). It's... not for everyone.)
posted by ovvl at 7:31 AM on April 3 [3 favorites]

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He was a legend in the creative writing world of my college years on the Eastern Shore.
posted by emelenjr at 8:08 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

Nothing only men like is cool.

Hey so I'm a woman. And I also loved John Barth when I was younger, and still have a weird soft spot, despite dirty old man energy (a lot of my favorite writers have dirty old man energy). I'll agree he hasn't aged so well, and as far as the big name Postmodernist Writers go, I was always more of a Gaddis/Elkin/Barthelme girl. But, as a committed maximalist who honestly found the Hemingway-adjacent Carver-esque manly man minimalism much more irritating when I was studying Creative Writing, I still hold Barth's screed against minimalism in The Tidewater Tales close to heart .
posted by thivaia at 8:38 AM on April 3 [13 favorites]

Yeah I regretted including that the moment the edit window closed thivaia. My apologies.
posted by longtime_lurker at 8:54 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

PAGE FROM FINNEGANS WAKE, WITH JOHN BARTH’S NOTES

From the John Barth Collection
posted by chavenet at 9:04 AM on April 3 [4 favorites]

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He was one of the first "grown-up novelists" I read and I remember thinking I was hot shit for picking those books up as a teen. I still have fond memories.
posted by potrzebie at 9:15 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

I read The Sot-Weed Factor long ago and far away, my formative years. As I recall, it was something of a slog to get into at first (too much poesie), but I'm glad I did if only for the [re]vision it gave me of the founding of America being essentially one great and diabolical scam with sot-weed (aka tobacco) and thus slavery at the heart of it. Your basic manifest destiny of misfits, loony tunes and squalid criminals.



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posted by philip-random at 9:37 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

Yeah, longtime.lurker's got it. Entertainingly witty and brilliantly willing to adopt a particularly smutty version of any given literary form in a way which is total catnip to buddingly intellectual teens and early adults (especially but not exclusively male), but which, the older we get, seems sometimes embarrassingly puerile.

I mean, I still like his work. But on reread it's unmistakably a guilty pleasure.
posted by jackbishop at 9:38 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

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Not sure how his books will stand up to my current sensibilities after several decades, but he was certainly important for the 20-something me back in the day.
posted by aught at 9:53 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

In college, in a general Ed required course on American history, we were assigned to read and review a historical novel about American history. I picked The Sot-Weed Factor, a book I had picked up the summer before in paperback. The TA who had to read and grade my paper noted their surprise in seeing a paper on this book. Dr Wu above is referencing this book. I got an A on my paper.

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posted by njohnson23 at 10:20 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

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posted by doctornemo at 10:54 AM on April 3

"I honor and admire that intention, but just as often a great writer will come to his novel with a much less elevated purpose than wanting to undermine the Soviet government. Henry James wanted to write a book in the shape of an hourglass. Flaubert wanted to write a novel about nothing. What I’ve learned is that the muses’ decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose—they will sing or not regardless."
Paris Revew, 1985.

Seinfeld first ran July, 5, 1989.
The Berlin Wall fell that November.

Toast Flaubert' Ghost

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posted by clavdivs at 11:29 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

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posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:39 PM on April 3

I, too, loved Barth in my 20s and still have a soft spot for him. I saw this news and was thinking I might go back and re-read Chimera or Lost in the Funhouse. That was when I read a LOT of post-modernist fiction, though, and I haven't picked up any of my faves from then in decades. Still, I enjoyed the energy of his books and the tricks of his writing and as someone who grew up around the Chesapeake Bay, the settings of many of his books. Long live the stories.
posted by gingerbeer at 3:43 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]

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posted by monotreme at 5:43 PM on April 3