Coming Soon!!! Review
Coming Soon!!! tells the story of an aging Novelist Emeritus (Barth) engaged in a novel-writing competition with a young Novelist Aspirant (one Johns Hopkins Johnson, named after Barth’s alma mater). The two have both drawn inspiration from a dilapidated showboat named The Original Floating Opera II, found in the Chesapeake displaying the enticing words “Coming Soon!!!” Barth sees an opportunity to end his career the same way it began, with a postmodern novel about floating operas. “Hop” Johnson sees an opportunity to breathe new life into the dated novel format by mixing in elements of hypertext, multimedia and musical theatre. The battle is joined.
The reader is presented with excerpts of the novels-in-progress, both of which are entirely about the writing of said novels. The format has its charm, especially when the authors attempt to rewrite one another’s story and change the course of events. We are treated to a few amusing extrapolations of Edna Ferber’s novel and musical Show Boat. (Think the Don Quixote sections of Tidewater Tales or the Sindbad sections of Somebody the Sailor.)
And then things fall apart. In one of the strangest literary maneuvers I’ve ever seen, Barth interrupts the narrative to declare that his novel is behind schedule and will never be finished by Y2K as originally planned. So he decides to just skip four years of plot development and summarize them on a 7-page chart. Which he does, along with a completely unnecessary synopsis of world events during that period.
From there on out, Coming Soon!!! reads like the outline of a much larger work that Barth simply gave up on. The novel-competition element of the plot sort of peters out as the reader is updated on the trials and tribulations of “Hop” Johnson’s musical theatre troupe. Unfortunately, because of the four-year summary chat, Barth hasn’t developed any of these characters enough for the reader to care. It feels like the author set out to write a sprawling, highly structured opus like LETTERS and simply changed his mind a quarter of the way through.
Even the prose is a disappointment. Readers will have difficulty getting past the multitude of prologues and false starts in the book’s first fifty pages, which only make sense in hindsight. From there on in, the writing is so densely packed with cutesy wordplay that it’s difficult to sit through. Take, for example, this paragraph, narrated by “Hop” Johnson:
So hi ho again, Readerino mio! And hey: Thanks a bunch for booting Yrs Truly up instead of out; for clicking himon, repaging him — whatever ’twas Y’all must’ve just now up & done, or we wouldn’t be left-to-righting here again altogether, would we now? Just You’n Yr Young-Fart Alternative Narrator Johns(let’s hear that s!) Hopkins Johnson, Bachelor of Arts and Novelist Aspirant. See Hop run! [p. 148]
Yes, “Hop” Johnson’s writing is meant to be a deliberate parody of Barth’s. And Barth has written many thoroughly enjoyable exercises in narrative indulgence and literary hocus-pocus. But with Coming Soon!!!, Barth has failed to conjure up any pleasures in the story besides postmodern tricks. It’s a funhouse of mirrors with nothing to reflect.