The Floating Opera and the End of the Road - by John Barth (Paperback)

About the Book

The Floating Opera and The End of the Road are John Barth's first two novels. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effect of an overactive intellect on human emotions. Separately they give two very different views of a universal human drama.

Book Synopsis

From the author of National Book Award-nominated Lost in the Funhouse - John Barth's first two novels are both existential comedies featuring strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effects of an overactive intellect on the emotions.

"[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." --The New York Times

The relationship between these two darkly comic novels is evident not only in their ribald and philosophical subject matter but in their eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone. The protagonist of The Floating Opera is Todd Andrews, an orphaned war veteran who has been sleeping with his friend's wife. Todd awakens in the morning determined to commit suicide, having concluded that nothing in life has intrinsic value--but then spends the day methodically reasoning his way into disregarding that fact and remaining a part of the floating opera of life.

In The End of the Road, a man named Jacob Horner finds himself literally paralyzed by an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. He begins an unconventional course of "mythotherapy" treatment at the Remobilization Farm, but his eccentric doctor's directives lead him into a tragic love triangle and from there to the nihilistic end of the road. Separately these two novels give two very different views of the universal human quest for meaning, and together they form the beginnings of an illustrious literary career.

Review Quotes

"One of the joys of The Floating Opera is that it is a rambling, overstuffed first novel bearing as much ambition and stylistic frothiness as the more physically daunting [novels] that came later. . . . It's a good story. An engrossing one . . . even if the 'writer' does end up digressing and winking and leading the reader occasionally astray." --The Los Angeles Times

"The End of the Road is a darkly funny and strange interpretation of the university-campus novel, a kind of American spiritual cousin to Lucky Jim, with a dash of mock-existentialism and parody of Ayn Rand-style mid-century narcissism. . . . Barth plays many scenes for laughs, yet the story, which centers on Horner's rather blank search for a code by which to live, leads to a finale of unexpected violence and emotional force." --The New Yorker

"The End of the Road is a profound deliberation on the dominant Western philosophy of its time, existentialism, which Barth, in a Camus-like story of a marital affair, first seems to value and then exposes as obscenely inadequate." --The New York Times

About the Author

John Barth (1930-2024) was an American writer celebrated for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. Barth's first novel, The Floating Opera, was published in 1956, followed by The End of the Road. Barth achieved critical and commercial success in the 1960s with The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy. His collection of interconnected stories, Lost in the Funhouse, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1969. His other works include Chimera, a collection of three novellas that won the National Book Award in 1973; Letters, an epistolary novel; Sabbatical: A Romance; The End of the Road; and The Friday Book, a collection of essays.