Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative

by John Barth

In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two an older, retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young, aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers navigate, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, The United States Of America, Novels

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

John Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composed The Shirt of Nessus , a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hee-haw! This p-novel was a rootin-tootin' pain-in-tha-bummie and no mistake!!! Johnnie Barth, PoMo Prince, writer of those-long-ASSED-novels ya don't wanna read, sends himself up in this excrutiating and entertaining ROMP!

The book is Barth's (the AULD duffa)'s attempt to comment on the rise of the e-novel, the hypertext generation and where the novel stands in relation to online FIC!!! Johns Hopkins Johnson (JHJ) (based on tha university where he sure as hell once-did-and-does-still dirn work) is the young e-novelist, who also happens (no coincidence, shugga) to be workin' on the revamped seafaring theater where JB based his debut 1950s novel, The Floating Opera!

Johnny B pits himself against the upstart to write a novel called COMING SOON!!! (three exclamation marks at all times, shugga) before the Y2K meltdown. There's antics a-go-go as JHJ gits friendly with Sherry "those eyes those eyes" McAndrews (the ship's theatre director) and the whole wacky-batty-pogoing-mad crew!

But the novel's more a comment-and-then-some on Barth's career and his obsession with this wholehere Floating Opera thingie. And why he likes basin' so muchof his works thereabouts or therearounds the dirn sea!!!! Whattaguy!!

If this review his irritated you, this ain't the novel for you, sweetie. This be the style (albeit funnier, smarter and more informativier, ha-ho-ha!!!). Fans of Barth will ROMPIN' WELL LOVE IT! Others read THE SOT-WEED FACTOR!

COMING SOON!!!???? I don't think so!!!!

[Mike]

I was going to review John Barth's postmodern novel - or "narrative" - Coming Soon!!!, but I felt funny about reviewing a book I hadn't finished, so I'm just going to burble on about it without any particular structure, which is actually not dissimilar to what Barth does, or at least gives the impression of doing.

It's more or less a novel about a novelist having trouble writing a novel, which Barth (who taught as well as practiced creative writing for many years) acknowledges as the worst kind of undergraduate approach to getting around writer's block.

No undergraduate work this, though. Although part of the fiction is that a student at the university from which Barth has just retired is writing something which sometimes is another novel about the same material, and sometimes is the same novel, and sometimes an electronic fiction, and sometimes a musical show for performance on a showboat called The Original Floating Opera II (based in turn on a showboat in Barth's first novel). And so forth. Complicated, self-referential, continually shifting, etc. Postmodern. Memorably defined by Moe of The Simpsons as "weird for the sake of weird".

The verbal fireworks start on page one and don't let up - after a while they became pretty wearing, actually. And (to change the metaphor) eventually I got the sense that a talented magician was performing extensive patter and misdirection but failing to conceal - in fact, drawing attention to - the fact that he not only hadn't produced a rabbit, but didn't possess a hat.

So I stopped reading on page 288 (of 396) when it was looking fairly clear that nothing was actually Coming Soon!!!, that it would just be more of the same.

I'm giving the impression that I didn't enjoy it. I did enjoy it, for its sheer artistry and complexity and wit, but that's the thing about the self-consciously postmodern - I can appreciate it intellectually as being obviously very hard to do, very clever, but often my emotional reaction is that it wasn't worth doing.

One of the improvised songs for the show raises the question well:

Are we Postmodern?
Is this the end of the road?
Or is recycled self-conscious irony just one more passing mode?
If we're Postmodern,
How come I feel so passé?

- to the tune of "The Party's Over".

On the back of the copy I read is a quote from the Chicago Sun-Times which I entirely agree with: "Barth is extraordinarily clever and a master of language." And that is what makes him such a great postmodern novelist, because cleverness and mastery of language are the heart of literary postmodernism (and a lot of postmodern visual art, too, where almost all of the skill is in the piece's clever title). He is playing an extended game, and playing it very well and with great flair and often very amusingly, but never allowing us to forget that it is a game, and therefore ultimately trivial.

Seems to me (and what do I know?) that the main achievement of postmodernism is to point out the emptiness of modernism. However, in so doing it also displays, in fact points at, its own emptiness, which is an even greater emptiness, because it is (supposedly) empty even of the modernist claim that it is telling a true and important story - in fact, the true and important story.

Whatever it is that I am - I don't have a name for it; I've sometimes said it's postmodern, but it isn't really, it's something between post-postmodern and neo-medieval, but that too leaves out a lot; maybe transmodern - responds to this postmodern perspective by suggesting that modernism is not so much empty as emptied. Modernism at its extreme has deliberately removed the spiritual, the mystical, and ultimately by association the personal and emotional, denigrating these and elevating the physical, the rational, the "objective" and the intellectual. Postmodernism - in one of its forms, anyway - takes this as its starting point and turns the intellectual cleverness of modernism back on itself, doing for its myth what it did for all the myths before it and declaring it, too, to be empty and illusory.

I, on the other hand, want to re-examine some of the value assumptions of modernism and say, wait on, what makes rationality necessarily more "true" than the other aspects of humanity? In order to be fully human we cannot only be rational (though we need not be irrational either; rationality is also an aspect of humanity, and attempting to abandon it is an overreaction to modernism). Yes, the emperor has no clothes. That's because he took them off - not because clothes don't exist.

[Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh! This book tired me out on the first page. Allegedly a pastiche of postmodernism and Barth's place in the p.m.ist canon, it is instead an exhausting exercise for the reader. Watch me do this!!! Watch me do that!!! Watch me, watch me, watch ME!!! List after list after list made me wonder: Where was the editor and what is it that p.m.ists love about lists? Pynchon, and in Baudolino, Eco, have this same listing tendency. Nevertheless, in defense of editors, this would have been a difficult manuscript to edit. The elements of a good story are there but this reader became sidetracked by the hyperbolic performance of the author, one which is not nearly so amusing as either Lawrence Sterne's or Henry Fielding's 400 years ago.

In a nutshell the story involves a young novelist attempting to dazzle his way into a graduate writing program at a Big U., one for which he is unhappily named. I know parents who've done this to their children: I once met a girl named Maize (pronounced Maisie) in Ann Arbor, home of the maize and blue U of Mich. The story also involves an older novelist at the end of his career and there is more, much, much more. We learn about the bright young man's internship aboard an old-style showboat, The Original Floating Opera II, aka TOFO (self-referentialism is at least another paragraph), the cast of characters thereon and we learn a lot about Chesapeake Bay. Shades of Edna Ferber (actually mentioned, along with Ava Gardner) but alas, no mention of the folly of Fitzcarraldo, a fabulous showboat movie.

Mr. Barth is surely a widely read, intelligent man but parenthetical insertions, footnotes, abbreviations, acronyms et al., create the impression of a two year old showing off. Depth of knowledge then becomes a shallow but broad river of information demanding the attention of the reader: Look how much I know!!! To be fair, this is the first novel of Mr. Barth's that I've read; a book of short stories was my only previous exposure to his p.m.ist world. The Book of 10 Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories contains beautifully written, compassionate and intelligent tales interrupted, because this is p.m.ism, by the author in discussions with his muse.

However I'm not giving up on Mr. Barth and look forward to reading The Sotweed Factor which I hope I like. I do love a good story but Coming Soon!!! just ain't one of them.

[Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love pomo, but couldn't make it past page three. *Way* too self-referential. The literary equivalent of jacking off.

[Marc Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMcyR...

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any novel by John Barth since, say, The End of the Road, isn’t something one reads, but, rather, something one works through, and here again I found myself wrung out by the pomo narrative complexity and of-the-moment score-settling which all came at the expense of my enjoyment. And I know – I’ll be the first to concede – that enjoyment isn’t the principal job of quote serious literature unquote, but I also know – as Barth concedes – that Barth is concerned with entertaining his reader, and so this was, at some level, a miss for me. Okay, so, the plot isn’t really summarizable since so much of the “plot” is commentary on other of Barth’s plots which means summarizing, like, ten other books, but Coming Soon!!! is about two authors, the Novelist Emeritus (i.e., John Barth) who is working on a print book called Coming Soon!!! A Narrative about the travails of The Original Floating Opera II, a floating theater putting on a show called Coming Soon! about the end of the century/millennium/world, and the Novelist Aspirant, Johns Hopkins Johnson (i.e., David Foster Wallace (kind of)), who is working on an e-book called Coming Soon!!! The Novel about the travails of The Original Floating Opera II, a floating theater putting on a show called Coming Soon! about the end of the century/millennium/world. NA, in regular contact with NE, is explicitly attempting to usurp NE by writing in the new century’s new medium, while NE is explicitly attempting to retain his dominance in the face of this not-quite-respectful upstart. Neither Novelists’ novels, however, is coming along very easily, and the approaching end of the millennium is felt by both to be a built-in deadline in order for their novels-of-the-turn-of-the-millennium to be relevant. What we’re reading, then, are dueling accounts of pretty much the same action from different perspectives in different stylized voices conveyed almost entirely through exposition (albeit, very stylized exposition) articulating how their work on their novels isn’t going very well and will surely be abandoned (even though we know it won’t since we’re reading it). Oh boy. I came to this book through Stephen Burn, who referred to Coming Soon!!! as Barth’s response to Wallace’s “Westward,” which latter is explicitly about a young upstart novelist taking Barth’s place in the pantheon of American belles-lettres. And it’s clear to me that this book is – like Markson’s Notecard Quartet – Barth writing about his own legacy and position in that very pantheon. But, of course, by the time this shows up (twelve years after “Westward”) Barth’s postmodernism had moved on, and so this reads like Barth struggling to defend his relevance by competing with (and, I suppose, besting) a strawman character. The victory, as perhaps Barth also recognizes, is a pyrrhic one—in the end, the floating opera, TOFOII, is burned (though it doesn’t sink) and turned into a sea lab, and the novel that NE worked so hard to complete is a memorial to an aesthetic that no longer has purchase in the world around him. I love John Barth and will read all of his stuff in time, but this one lowers his batting average.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

barth is like the guy who's got some self-absorbed narcissism like some characters out of Goodbye Columbus, but the characters are worse and there's 740 pages about a guy's fascination with corndogs and imaginary television programs

if you like words, don't like the plot, don't like the characters, don't like the humor, then this book and most of barth's other books might work for you...

otherwise you stick to his top three books, and save the rest of your time for joining the Church of Carrot Top

but you know the blurbs for this book sound so awesome, it could be the next cult fave like the Television show Manimal

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

ITEOTWAWKI & Barth b Showboatin'.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disappointing novel from one of my favorite writers. Barth always balances his postmodern tricks with a cracking good story ("The Sot-Weed Factor", for example, is real page-turner), but in his attempt to write a novel summing up his whole career, he gets lost in endless self-reflexivity. A novel about a novelist writing his last novel, which is about a novelist writing his last novel, and so on. The book is so self-referential that only someone who has read all of Barth's fiction would know what he was up to - and even I was bored by it. After this book was published in 2001, Barth gave up on novels and focused on short stories, to much greater effect.

[David]

As I re-read Barth, I find myself having an unexpected reaction: most of my favourites, years ago, I no longer like as much, while a couple of those I did not like as much seem to have grown on me. Barth seems to have been repeating himself in many ways, perhaps ever since LETTERS. Of course, that’s part of the point in his postmodern aesthetic. But I’m finding myself, entering my own 60s now, less willing to go with his flow.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite as exhilarating an experience as the novels of his heyday, this (apparently) final novel from Barth still has the same genius wordplay, enjoyable characters, and interesting pomo tricks of his better works. Plus, this book brings his career full circle and should be read by those who, like myself, have read and enjoyed all his other works.

[Elizabeth Urello · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not one of his best.