Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative Paperback – October 22, 2002

Coming Soon!!! (Or End Time, or The New Show) is a joyous post-modern romp, a witty, intelligent mash of ideas hovering around the central conceit of a showboat, an author, and another author.The plot is difficult to explain. John Barth - the author - wrote, as his first book, The Floating Opera, a novel that was loosely about The Original Floating Opera, a showboat on the Chesapeake. Johns Hopkins Johnson is an aspiring young author, and for his master's writing thesis, he wishes to create a sequel to The Floating Opera, a sequel that involves Johns writing his version of the sequel, and John Barth - the fictional character - writing another at the same time, in a competition. John Barth (A) reads this thesis submission and is intrigued, deciding that he would like to write the same novel, in a competition as well. So. We have the real author writing a story where the author 'John Barth' is writing a sequel to his previous novel while a young wannabe author attempts it as well, and while this is happening, a young wannabe author is writing a sequel to John Barth's novel while a character of John Barth is doing the same. Confusing.But it isn't, really. Barth manages to handle this story-within-a-story gimmick quite well, and in fact he does it in a few other ways on top of that. At the beginning of the real, physical novel, we are assuming that we are reading the Novel Emeritus' - the real John Barth - version, but by the end of the novel, there have been enough scattered hints to suggest that maybe Johns Hopkins Johnson won the challenge, and we are actually reading his novel. Maybe it is both? The question is never conclusively answered, and couldn't be, really, as the answer would lie in the universe outside the novel.Post-modern plot aside, Barth absolutely revels in playing with the English language. He capitalises words to add emphasis, combines words, rambles on, inserts commentary about his own personal life, et ceteras, abbreviates and just has fun: 'Detour now, is it, O Opter of the Options, Clicker of the Clicker, Mastress of the Might Mouse? Detour it is, then, even as Mlle Sherry Singer directed back there in (my) Chap. 1, 'Commencement' - Where last we saw your Novelist Aspirant & Apprentice narrator hip-hopping south and east and south again on wings of desire,...' and so on and so on. There are puns: On the The Original Floating Opera II, there is a character, the Phantom. Phantom of the Opera. Get it? Hilarious. Well, it is, in the narrative structure that Barth has created. He throws in the the elements for a joke, then, several paragraphs later, puts it all together. If you can catch it before he does, you win, if not, you get to giggle at his cleverness.The plot largely focuses on The Original Floating Opera II, with expositionary detours of what the Novelist Emeritus (Barth) is doing over the five years of the story, and then the Novelist Aspirant (Hopkins) gets a turn, introducing us to his love, Sherry, his parents, his ideas and dreams, and of course, the showboat. They both write the same chapters, a '1995.1' and a '1995.2', but there are little 'off-story' sections as well, including a Cast of Several, which explains all of the characters and their roles. 47 pages into the novel.The novel can be a difficult read. Barth is very, very clever, and he knows enough of the English language and grammatical structure that he can mix it up and mess it about with ease. And he does. If rambling, largely irrelevant plots coupled with trickery for trickery's sake and a penchant for look-at-me cleverness is not your idea of a rip-roaring novelistic experience, then pass by the pastiche of witticisms. If it is, then settle down and enjoy the work of a master at the top of his game.

I hate to do this, but I'm reviewing this book without having read all of it yet. Does this make me seem pretentious and rather smart-allecky? Yes. But I just had to write a response to the previous review. I wholeheartedly understand how someone who reads books merely for story's sake would not enjoy this book; there's not much of a story. But to read Barth's later works for simply this reason is wherein the fallacy lies. You see, Barth is the master (as far as I'm concerned) of literary gymnastics and narrative techniques. If you enjoy literature qua literature, then you'll like this. The first twenty pages alone (which the first reviewer claimed were boring) blew my mind for the sheer technique. Surely this book is not for everyone, it's actually for a very small number of people, but please don't criticize it for not being "standard" like, say, Larry McMurty.And if you just read a book for the storyline with no appreciation for the literary merits, why not just waste less time and go see a movie? (Oh yeah, I almost forgot how much you like to claim that reading is more rewarding than watching movies.)

The first 20 pages of Coming Soon was all I could tolerate. The author's use of obscure slang and 'clever' devices such as the 'book-within-a-book,' notes from the fictitious author and memos from his fictitious mentor combined to make a work of fiction so rambling and intensely annoying that I could not force myself to continue. If you love a good story, as I do, then you will probably find youself wondering, as I did, if the author will ever get to one. Coming Soon is a work likely to make many readers wonder "Why am I not a published author?" I recommend that you read ANYTHING by Larry McMurtry instead.

Generally speaking, you know you're in dangerous territory when an author, ((especially one who breaks narrative illusion and addresses the reader directly)), takes up the theme of writer's block. Lots of times it really does mean that a writer has nothing to write about. That said, novels about writing novels--or not writing them--are usually only of interest to other novelists. So *Coming Soon* was of some interest to me. But for the most part *Coming Soon* reads like a novel written by an author who never quite did get over his writer's block--but managed to turn out 400 pages all the same.Don't get me wrong. I wanted to like this book--there being all too few "literary," not to mention experimental, authors getting widespread publishing opportunities in the current American publishing scene. And I am quite a fan of Barth's *Lost in the Funhouse*--see my review for details. So *Coming Soon* was a great disappointment to me. It's certainly not--in the oft-used phrased--a novel by a master at the height of his powers.Barth employs a favorite postmodern device in *Coming Soon* --the story within the story within the story. But when the core story isn't all that interesting it's only four time less interesting to have it told on four different levels. The plot, in short, is this: An old writer approaching the millennial year 2000, John Barth himself, and a young aspiring writer who reminds the old Barth of a young Barth find themselves racing each other--and the millennium--to write a novel that takes up the theme of old Barth's first novel as a young writer, *The Floating Opera.* At the same time, a local Chesapeake theater troupe mounts a musical about the old days of the showboat which was the basis for Barth's first novel and now, ironically, his last. So it is that Barth at the same time parodies and comments upon postmodernism and its tendency to loot the past and make a pastiche of the present, forming an intricate web of references and cross-references that in themselves seem to mean something...but what? The fact that Barth is looting his own past--both fictional and nonfictional--only adds to the irony, significance, brilliance, confusion?Well, that all depends. In the case of *Coming Soon* the result is what I found to be rather a lot of unwelcome detail about the showboats that plied the Chesapeake in days-gone-by, as well as the history behind the novel-turned-Broadway hit-turned Hollywood film that originally celebrated these showboats--Showboat!--and that inspired Barth's first--and now his last--novel, *The Floating Opera.* There's a purposely over-obvious and ironically ham-handed Biblical link between the showboat and Noah's Ark, Y2K and Revelation, but its no less over-obvious and ham-handed just because it's supposed to be. There's a lot of doubling of characters and conflicts of past and present, of young Barth and old Barth, all of it way too inextricably tangled to untangle, the typical postmodern Moebius strip type of storytelling that can be so enchanting if its about anything you remotely care about. Here it isn't.The overall Ur-theme of *Coming Soon* is the dying of the old--showboats, live theater, novels, celebrated novelists--and the morphing of the new forms--TV, internet, electronic fiction, brash new literary provocateurs. Old Barth and his print novel vs. Young Barth and his e-fiction. This is a potentially fruitful subject, but here it's so blighted by interminable discussions of sailing, of the history of the showboat, of matters so tangential and of so little interest or necessity that it's as if Barth were doing a kind of authorial version of pacing to and fro while waiting for ideas to come, as if, for instance, in the middle of this review I started to describe in minute detail the chair I was sitting upon while writing this review as if by doing so I were making my point. There are huge barren stretches of *Coming Soon* that read in exactly this way.There was a moment at around page 350 when I actually thought, okay give it another star, Barth is going to pull tight all the loose strings of this story and really make something powerful out of it, but then his grip faltered and it all sort of unraveled again into the same rather rambling mess it was before.Barth is at his best when he writes wistfully of his own mortality--he's turning 70 in *Coming Soon* --but then he's back to his "rollicking" plot and the tedium practically crushes the interest out of you. Oh there are some sparkling moments, a few laughs, but, for the most part, the hallmark clever wordplay and literary jokes are flaccid and fall flat. *Coming Soon*? I'd say, that like the Y2K apocalypse, it never quite arrived.