Customer Reviews

The Sot-Weed Factor

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If you've read the book, then you know exactly what I'm talking about and are probably doubled over in laughter just at the mention of it . . . if you haven't, well there's just one more reason to start reading this. Widely considered Barth's best novel (I'm very much a novice with him, this being only my second book so I'm no man to judge) I can easily see why it deserves such a status. A parody of historical novels, Barth writes the story in the style of that time so it seems like all those books your teachers made you read in high school, but better. The book is massive and concerns the various adventures of would-be poet Ebenezer Cooke, writer of the poem "The Sot-Weed Factor" as he becomes involved, willingly or otherwise, in more situations than any man should reasonably have to undertake. An attempts to summarize the plot are useless, it's too sprawling, people who want instant gratification will be at a loss here, this is a book you have to absorb over the course of a few days and get used to the style before it sinks in just how much fun it is. The characters play everything seriously, making the jokes (and there are plenty, with the funniest of a vulgar nature and often involving the story of Captain John Smith of Pocohantus fame) come off as utterly hilarious, but at the same time Barth manages to make you care just a little bit about them, as quirky as they are, they still come across as typically flawed human beings. Probably the best thing about the book is its sheer unpredictability, not shackled by the morals of the 16th century, anything and everything does happen, nobody is what they seem and situations shift gears so rapidly that it'll make your head spin even as you can't stop laughing. A truimph on nearly every level, this is something a lesser writer would have only managed to turn into a stale stylistic genre exercise, something to wow the kids in the creative writing workshop . . . what Barth creates here is something lasting and no matter what century it was written in or evokes, will probably wind up being timeless.

This true American masterpiece is written like a 17th century literary novel. The style could well be Fielding, except that Barth is even more hilarious.At a time when minimalist novelists seem to be in vogue, I revelled in the intelligent richness of the elaborate quixotic tale woven by Barth. When a novelist can write as well as peers like Saul Bellow or V.S. Naipaul, then a maximalist style like Barth's is to be savoured. Poor chaste poet laureate, Ebenezer Cooke, encounters harsh reality at every turn, including capture by pirates and Indians. His dreams drive him to ridiculous ends where his ambitions are constantly confounded by greater existential powers. "The road to Heaven's beset with thistles, and methinks there's many a cowpat on't." The dialogue is delicious and well-constructed with an authenticity and wit and bawdy truth. You have to marvel at the construction of such credible characters as Joan Toast, Bertrand, Boabdil, Andrew, Pocahontas and the pirate captain. Barth's dialogue on various letters of the alphabet, the trading of ancient insults and the scene where Ebenezer fears drowning in Chesapeake Bay were uproariously funny. Barth obviously knows the Eastern Shore near the Choptank River intimately: it's a lovely setting for his novel. For any true lover of great American literary novels, The Sotweed Factor should be on your must-read list.

Perhaps most impressive of all of John Barth's picaresque classic is the fact that it succeeds on many levels. It is quite difficult to imagine anyone taking this novel completely seriously, however it can be read as an epic. Most likely it will be enjoyed as a brilliant satire providing most readers with innumerable passages that will have them laughing out loud. However one senses many philosophical statements and themes communicated through the characters' preposterous actions and attitudes. It was the characters, in fact, that impressed me the most about "The Sot-Weed Factor," while appearing at times ridiculous to the point of being hilarious, most readers will likely find a little bit of themselves in characters like Ebenezer Cooke, Henry Burlingame, etc. My favorite character was Ebenezer's servant whose name eludes me at this time. Barth has coined himself a "smiling nihilist" and this book is a fine example of this sentiment, though most readers will likely spend less time smiling and more time doubled over in laughter. A must-read!

I know it's supposed to spoof historical novels, but I didn't read "The Sot-Weed Factor" that way at all. To me it read like a darkly comic epic, reminiscent of "Water Music" by T. Coraghessan Boyle. I loved the characters, especially the main protagonist, Ebeneezer Cooke, the wannabe Poet Laureate of colonial Maryland. He starts out as a prim, officious twit, but his character is befouled almost continuously from the outset, so that by the end of the book he is a resigned (if not wholly self ironic) and nearly sympathetic character. And I guess that is what makes this book work for me: it follows all the rules for successful story telling. There is a central conflict (and a thousand hilarious ancillary conflicts), a crisis of spectacular proportion, believable resolution, and character transformation. The story is riddled with deception, fraud, betrayal, mistaken identity, errant bravado, sex, scatalogical humor, and enough action and adventure to hold the attention of almost any reader. At 750+ pages, it took me a month to read it (if you travel cross-country, it's perfect for those four-hour plane trips), and now that I'm finished, I'd have to say it was one of the finest months I've ever spent reading. I wish I was starting it all over again for the first time. Haply I'll read it again.

I have an official list of "The Three Funniest Novels That I Have Ever Read." The three books are, in no particular order, Stanislaw Lem's THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS, Joseph Heller's CATCH-22, and John Barth's THE SOTWEED FACTOR. There were times in the latter, especially near the end, where I had to pause repeatedly in my reading to laugh out loud.

But this book has much more to offer than just humor. Barth, who in his novels clearly reveals himself to be a student of the genre, strives to write an 18th century novel in the 20th century, and succeeds magnificently. I believe that this novel couldn't help but delight any serious reader whose possesses even the slightest sense of humor.

Best book I ever read. No favorite colors, films, songs, artists, authors, weather patterns in my life - but one book I'll call the best, the favorite. Twenty-five to thirty years ago I read it over and over again until it's eventual disintegration from use and from its own weight. I still have yellowed clips of paragraphs, retyped (on an IBM Selectric, thank you) and carried in pocket or purse to remind me to change my angle of observation from time to time. Plenty of reviews here to tell you the story, I'm just here to praise it.

Although "The Sot-Weed Factor" is a brick of a book, it reads breezily. Barth managed to create a great parody of a historical novel, and a novel of "box in a box" type - there are so many interconnected stories, retrospectives, lost and found memoir, twists and turns, and everything written in such a hilarious manner and at a top speed, that only someone who is totally in control of his writing could make this work.
The main protagonist, Ebenezer Cooke, wants to make a career of writing and becomes the Poet-Laureate of Maryland (at the end of the 17th century, when its boundaries are disputable and there is practically no law enforcement or morals) with a mission to write an epic poem praising this territory. He goes to Maryland and gets involved in most improbable adventures, in which the crucial role is played by his former tutor, Henry Burlingame, a character of many faces (in fact, almost every character is not who they were at the beginning, including Eben's twin sister or his prostitute muse). Many legendary and historical characters are also mentioned in this novel, which in fact, albeit satirically, forms a Maryland epic in itself. The language and humor are unbeatable, and it is an intellectual delight.

This is the only book of this size (1200 pages) that I have read three times. I first read it in 1972 and just read it again last year. It is definitely NOT a "beach" read, and requires concentration, but is well worth it. After this, I read two or three more by Barth, and was quite disappointed.

Over the first three months of 1955, American author John Barth wrote the first part of an intended trilogy of works -- his 'nihilistic comedy', "The Floating Opera". He completed the second part, "The End of the Road" (a 'nihilistic tragedy') in the final three months of the same year. Encouraged by the speed with which he composed these two books, Barth embarked on the final part, convinced he would have it completed by the time he turned 26, on May 27, 1956. In the end, it took him over three years to pen the 800-odd pages of what was to became "The Sot-Weed Factor" -- a massive and massively complex burlesque comedy, in antiquated style, which would forever after be seen as one of his greatest achievements, and the book that would stand as a timeless landmark to the brilliance of this young American writer. In deciding a subject for this book, Barth underwent something of a major crisis in a hitherto almost blind pursuit of realism in his fiction, eventually coming to a realisation that words, ultimately, can never truly convey reality, thus making realism an imperfect tool for communicating the truth of anything. In David Morel's seminal paper, "Ebenezer Cooke, Sot-Weed Factor Redivivus: The Genesis of John Barth's The Sot- Weed Factor" (published in the Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 8, No. 1 [Spring, 1975]) Barth is quoted as summing up his views in an interview, thus: "One ought to know about Reality before one writes realistic novels. Since I don't know much about Reality, it will have to be abolished. What the hell, Reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there, and literature never did, very long."

Rather than continue in his pursuit of realism, with "The Sot-Weed Factor" Barth turned instead to the idea of art-as-artifice and set about writing a comic, half-farcical novel built on historical documents, imitating the conventions of the eighteenth-century novelist, and encapsulating all of the elements of the classic eighteenth-century novel: 'a hero on a journey with a nit-wit servant as his companion; a search for one's father and one's long-lost beloved; stories told along the road; tests of virtue and manliness; encounters with bandits, bawds, noblemen, and bullies; unbelievable coincidences; abundant fornication and adultery, with possible incest; and more, all woven into a plot whose complications seem designed for nothing more than to spin the reader's head' [Morel, ibid]. All of this Barth achieves in splendid style in "The Sot-Weed Factor", taking as its inspiration an obscure and barely known poem, first published in London in 1708: "The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland", attributed to one Eben Cooke (Gent) which describes in cumbersome rhyming couplets the poet's daunting experiences setting out from England to take up a new life in Maryland as a tobacco ('sot-weed') merchant. With little known about its author, authenticity or any of the circumstances under which it was written, Barth was free to construct almost any story he wished around the work and, indeed, the poet, Ebenezer Cooke. Barth being a native of Maryland, he was also ideally placed to research and weave in at length a great deal of that State's early colonial history and legend, involving native chiefs, piratical bands, slave traders, whores and assorted eighteenth century opportunists of various waters.

The result is an absolute tour de force, which achieves all that the author set out to achieve and more, mixing fact, fantasy, and Cooke's original poetic publication into a seamless blend which creates a greater reality from the very act of its fabrication and which, with supreme irony, required the author to tone down some of the truly ludicrous historical truths in order that the book be not deemed altogether too far-fetched and fantastical. The book is a classic on many, many levels; the plot is massive and its twists and convolutions can be immensely difficult to follow, as confusion and subterfuge abound. But it is alluring and masterfully handled throughout. As indeed are most of the wenches (and at least one of the sows) who feature in it.

Lustily recommended.

Utterly hilarious, page after page after page. Brilliant. Genius. You are thankful of the thickness of the book, as you ruefully measure how many more pages of entertainment you have left. If there were a medical procedure to have my memory of the book removed, I would do it, just so I can read the book again fresh. But I'm going to read it again anyway. Rollicking.