Word: barth
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...quite literally they cried. In fiction, the selling phrase was "black humor." Some of the best books of the '60s came out ghastly-funny, as if novelists were facing nuclear-age madness, crossed eyeballs to crossed eyeballs: Terry Southern in his underrated little masterpiece The Magic Christian, John Barth in The Sot-weed Factor, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Mother Night, Saul Bellow in Herzog...
...acquire weaker ones, and undercapitalized houses are wooing those that are better financed. During the 15 months ending April 1, the number of New York Stock Exchange member firms declined from 646 to 612, largely through mergers. Recently, Dean Witter & Co. agreed to take over San Francisco-based J. Barth & Co., and Clark, Dodge acquired the West Coast brokerage firm of Irving Lundborg & Co. Last week Halle & Stieglitz announced that it would take over five offices of Orvis Brothers & Co. in the Manhattan area, and Charles Plohn & Co. said that it would economize by transferring its stock-clearing operations...
...violence. It is interesting, visually, but the sequences involving it are far too long relative to its dramatic importance to the rest of the movie. The film version of End of the Road has no internal sense or logic as a unified work. Southern and Avakian have taken Barth's story of marital infidelity in the 1950's and updated both the setting and the themes with disastrous results...
Southern chose to downplay Barth's major themes. The film only hints once at Horner's inability to choose. Mythotherapy is described in a sequence faithfully taken from the novel, but is never related to any of Jake's actions outside of the Farm...
...movie's primary fault is its failure to integrate those portions of the film concerning Jake's inner problems with those parts that deal with his relations with other people as successfully as Barth was able to do in the novel. Deviation from a tightly woven novel is permissible, but in End of the Road, the few haphazard changes that have been made render a great deal of the movie's action superfluous. Characters and events that have significance in the novel are reproduced outside of their context as a mere gesture of faithfulness to the original work...