The End of the Road
188 pages.
Original publisher: Doubleday.
Current publisher: Anchor Press.
Buy now from Amazon.com.
Synopsis
Written before The Floating Opera had even found a publisher, the book makes a good companion-piece to The Floating Opera with its similar style and narrative concerns. Though End of the Road seems rather tame today, it was considered rather controversial at the time because of its frank discussion of abortion almost two decades before Roe vs. Wade.
The book was later turned into a feature film starring Stacey Keach and James Earl Jones (the only book of Barth’s to reach feature film status). Terry Southern (of Dr. Strangelove fame) co-authored the screenplay. States Barth in the 1988 introduction to the book: “The film was X-rated by the Production Code Administration for scenes nowhere to be found in the novel (man rapes chicken, etc.) and Z-rated by the muses.” Yet the film apparently won a “Golden Leopard” (whatever that is) at the Locarno International Film Festival, and Leonard Maltin gives the film 3 1/2 stars, praising Keach and Jones’ “stinging performances” and calling it a “solid filmization of [a] bizarre John Barth novel.”
Barth’s original title for the book: What To Do Until the Doctor Comes.
Resources
- An excerpt in BoldType from The End of the Road
- An essay on The End of the Road by Jonathan Lethem
- Entry at the Internet Movie Database for the film adaptation
- An essay by Lee Hill on the Terry Southern website reassessing the merits of the film version of the novel.
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