The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative by John Barth
Charles Harris

John Barth. Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 396 pp. $26.00

Coming Soon!!! opens with a variation on the classic message-in-a-bottle motif employed by Barth throughout his career: the discovery by Ditsy, a transgendered progger, of a computer disk, waterproofed inside three Ziploc bags, containing an e-novel, which has washed ashore on a Chesapeake Bay marsh. To prog, Barth quickly informs us, means “to pick and poke about, to scavenge and to scrounge,” in search of nothing in particular, a kind of wetland dérive. Progging’s aleatory nature provides a clue to the structure of Barth’s narrative, which records the probative unfoldings of three works-in-progress: “Coming Soon!!!,” the latest postmodern novel by Novelist Emeritus (NE), a character not-so-loosely based on Barth himself; “Coming Soon!!!,” the post-PoMo hypertext Ditsy finds, written by Aspiring Novelist (AN) Johns Hopkins “Hop” Johnson, NE’s tutee and friendly rival; and “Coming Soon!!!,” the potential title of a PoMo or possibly post-PoMo showboat-musical adaptation of the various musical adaptations of Edna Ferber’s novel Showboat, on which NE and AN collaborate. As veteran readers of Barth’s fiction may suspect, Coming Soon!!! only imitates aleatory fiction. At his formalist best, Barth is firmly in control here, leaving little to random chance. Similarly, though the novel mimics hyperfiction, its pages sometimes emulating a computer screen, Barth remains self-consciously moored to print, providing his readers no real options for reassembling the novel’s narrative strands. Indeed, the old Maestro’s bravura orchestration of the multiple components of his latest opus provides one of this text’s chief pleasures.

In many respects, Coming Soon!!! serves as a companion piece to Barth’s 1994 novel Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, which Barth proclaimed was his “Last Book.” Like that earlier book, Coming Soon!!! is a meditation on last things, among them the century, the millennium, the Novelist Emeritus’s career and, soon enough, his life, postmodernism (whose “smoke-and-mirror tricks” Barth’s latest mocks, honors, and extends), and the “noble genre of the Novel” itself, which will not die, Barth maintains, so much as it will diminish, along with all print literature, into a coterie pleasure (“like poetry, archery, opera-going, equestrian dressage”). “Stock-taking” novels, both books revisit Barth’s first work, The Floating Opera, published forty-five years ago, but also manage, through allusion or recycled characters, to evoke everything Barth has written throughout a prolific career (Coming Soon!!! is Barth’s thirteenth work of fiction and his fifteenth book, its appearance marking the sixth consecutive decade in which he has published). But whereas Once upon a Time, a self-described “memoir bottled in a novel,” looks backward, Coming Soon!!! focuses on continuity (thus its structural emphasis on process), the reciprocity of past, present, and future narrative forms. The thought that new lives, careers, and literary forms will replace those fast fading into history hardly mitigates the novel’s sense of loss, however. Barth writes in his cheerful-nihilist mode, his comic mask seldom slipping-but make no mistake, this is an imaginary garden with real pain in it. The third installment (along with the masterful On with the Story, the 1996 short story series sandwiched between the novels) in his long farewell to a distinguished career, Barth continues to sing in his chains like the sea. As ever, it’s a performance well worth attending. [Charles Harris]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative by John Barth Charles Harris John Barth. Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 396 pp. $26.00 Coming Soon!!! opens with a variation on the classic message-in-a-bottle motif employed by Barth throughout his career: the discovery by Ditsy, a transgendered progger, of a computer disk, waterproofed inside three Ziploc bags, containing an e-novel, which has washed ashore on a Chesapeake Bay marsh. To prog, Barth quickly informs us, means “to pick and poke about, to scavenge and to scrounge,” in search of nothing in particular, a kind of wetland dérive. Progging’s aleatory nature provides a clue to the structure of Barth’s narrative, which records the probative unfoldings of three works-in-progress: “Coming Soon!!!,” the latest postmodern novel by Novelist Emeritus (NE), a character not-so-loosely based on Barth himself; “Coming Soon!!!,” the post-PoMo hypertext Ditsy finds, written by Aspiring Novelist (AN) Johns Hopkins “Hop” Johnson, NE’s tutee and friendly rival; and “Coming Soon!!!,” the potential title of a PoMo or possibly post-PoMo showboat-musical adaptation of the various musical adaptations of Edna Ferber’s novel Showboat, on which NE and AN collaborate. As veteran readers of Barth’s fiction may suspect, Coming Soon!!! only imitates aleatory fiction. At his formalist best, Barth is firmly in control here, leaving little to random chance. Similarly, though the novel mimics hyperfiction, its pages sometimes emulating a computer screen, Barth remains self-consciously moored to print, providing his readers no real options for reassembling the novel’s narrative strands. Indeed, the old Maestro’s bravura orchestration of the multiple components of his latest opus provides one of this text’s chief pleasures. In many respects, Coming Soon!!! serves as a companion piece to Barth’s 1994 novel Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, which Barth proclaimed was his “Last Book.” Like that earlier book, Coming Soon!!! is a meditation on last things, among them the century, the millennium, the Novelist Emeritus’s career and, soon enough, his life, postmodernism (whose “smoke-and-mirror tricks” Barth’s latest mocks, honors, and extends), and the “noble genre of the Novel” itself, which will not die, Barth maintains, so much as it will diminish, along with all print literature, into a coterie pleasure (“like poetry, archery, opera-going, equestrian dressage”). “Stock-taking” novels, both books revisit Barth’s first work, The Floating Opera, published forty-five years ago, but also manage, through allusion or recycled characters, to evoke everything Barth has written throughout a prolific career (Coming Soon!!! is Barth’s thirteenth work of fiction and his fifteenth book, its appearance marking the sixth consecutive decade in which he has published). But whereas Once upon a Time, a self-described “memoir bottled in a novel,” looks backward, Coming Soon!!! focuses on continuity (thus its structural emphasis on process), the reciprocity of past, present, and future narrative forms. The thought that new lives, careers, and literary forms will replace those fast fading into history hardly mitigates the novel’s sense of loss, however. Barth writes in his cheerful-nihilist mode, his comic mask seldom slipping-but make no mistake, this is an imaginary garden with real pain in it. The third installment (along with the masterful On with the Story, the 1996 short story series sandwiched between the novels) in his long farewell to a distinguished career, Barth continues to sing in his chains like the sea. As ever, it’s a performance well worth attending. [Charles Harris]

Search the full text of our books: