Where Three Roads Meet
176 pages.
Original publisher: Houghton Mifflin.
Buy now from Amazon.com.
Synopsis
From the book jacket:
“The first novella of this lively triad, ‘Tell Me,’ explores a callow undergraduate’s initiation into the mysteries of love, life, and the Heroic Cycle. The second novella, ‘I’ve Been Told,’ traces the history of storytelling and examines innocence and modernity, ignorance and self-consciousness. And the three elderly sisters of the third novella, ‘As I Was Saying,’ record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicings of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist. Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth’s deep intelligence and playful irreverence, Where Three Roads Meet will surely delight loyal fans and draw new ones.
Contents
- Tell Me
- I’ve Been Told
- As I Was Saying
Critical Reaction
“Teller, tale, torrid (and torpid) inspiration: Barth’s 17th book brings these three narrative ‘roads’ together inimitably, and thrice. It employs all of his familiar devices — alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns (”Leda lays egg, Egg hatches Helen, Helen lays Paris, Paris lays waste to Troy”) — to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate — obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously — a farewell to language and its objects: us.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In these three novellas, the irreverent master of verbal pyrotechnics shows off his literary chops; indulges in his obsessions with the heroic archetype, the number three, and the letter Y; engages in a good deal of truly funny self-mockery; and anticipates and undercuts readers’ reactions to his writing…. The novellas are aimed squarely at Barth devotees; the rest of us, befuddled and bemused, can only shake our heads at an old wisenheimer who seems to be laughing up his sleeve.”
— Booklist
“For his fans, this three-novella collection will be familiar, if predictable, territory. But the slender volume doesn’t stretch our understanding of Barth very far…. Whether Barth is long lost in his own funhouse of verbal trickery, or is parched from a well of inspiration run dry, it’s clear he’s not changing.”
“Widely popular or not, Barth remains a dazzling wordsmith, and his new book, a deceptively slender collection of thematically interrelated novellas called Where Three Roads Meet, is characteristic of his work — elliptical, irreverent and challenging…. In our age of disposal, predictable pop literature and reality television, reading John Barth offers a welcome reawakening to the possibilities of the art of narrative.”
— BookPage
“John Barth and Gabriel García Márquez’s newest don’t rank with their best, though the septuagenarian grandmasters probably aren’t sweating it. In Where 3 Roads Meet and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, it’s their self-possession that’s so intriguing.”
Resources
Houghton Mifflin page for Where Three Roads Meet
Critical Reaction
