A Study in Nihilism

THE END OF THE ROAD (230 pp.)--John Barfh--Doubleday ($3.95).

"Where the hell else but in America could you have a cheerful nihilism?" asks a leading character in this highly diverting book, which is a comedy with a tragic ending and, occasionally, a farce with a philosophical meaning. The character who asks the question is Joe Morgan, a history teacher at Wicomico State Teachers College, who has taught himself to "say good-by to objective values." He believes that energy is "what makes the difference between American pragmatism and French existentialism."

Joe has energy all right; he is writing a thesis, plays catch with his wife and sons, and runs a troop of Boy Scouts. But Author Barth matches him with a crushing tragedy in the face of which his pragmatism is meaningless and his nihilism a cheerless thing. The agent of his undoing is the narrator of the book, Jacob Horner, one of the most fascinatingly dreadful characters to appear in a long time. He is self-described as "owl. peacock, chameleon, donkey and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary." In more modern terms, he is also a manic-depressive, and a fugitive from a psychotherapeutic institution called the Remobilization Farm.

Days Without Weather. Horner, just turned 28, has suffered a paralyzing case of "birthday despondency." A sinister Negro doctor brings him out of it. In describing the doctor's manifold therapies, Novelist Barth shows a true satirist's hatred for all the quackery visited by blind belief in the healing powers of science upon muddled, addled and wicked souls.

The doctor's methods include the Nutritional, Dynamic, Informational, Sexual, Devotional, Preoccupational, Virtue and Vice Therapies, not to mention Theotherapy and Atheotherapy. This genius-quack, "a kind of super-pragmatist," tells Patient Horner: "It would not be well in your case to believe in God. Religion will only make you despondent. But until we work out something for you it will be useful to subscribe to some philosophy. Why don't you read Sartre and become an existentialist? . . . Study the World Almanac: it is to be your breviary for a while . . ."

Jacob Horner goes off to the sunlit campus of Wicomico State Teachers, where he has wangled an instructor's job (English). He tries the World Almanac cure, but boning up on statistics about air line distances between principal cities only demonstrates that facts cannot minister to a diseased mind. He knows his bad days, when there is "no weather," a haunting waking and sleeping dream in which he is deprived of contact with the natural world. When Horner re-establishes contact with people, it is through the "pretty dedicated bunch" at Wicomico. Here he discovers his true calling, of an absolute rather than a theoretical nihilism.

Fallible Device. Soon, in his one-man campaign to stamp out mental health, Horner seizes on his fellow teacher Joe Morgan, the energetic pragmatist. Morgan's wife Rennie is a kindred empty spirit. Says Horner of her: "She had peered deeply into herself and had found nothing." Rennie herself seems to agree. Of her life before she met Joe, she says: "I just dreamed along like a big blob of sleep." Now she regards her Joe as her personal God. After she discovers, in a grotesque episode of peeping tomfoolery, that her husband is not God after all, the novel reaches its nub with the mating of the two nothings--Rennie and Horner.

Gruesome in spirit, comic in detail, this triangle is doomed to ruin by Joe Morgan's philosophical code. He is stuck with the arid belief that his "values" are valuable simply because he believes in them, while his mad friend does not care what values he upholds; in fact, he has none. Joe talks everyone to death in the interests of honesty, and the spirit of togetherness is symbolized by the fact that husband and lover are made aware that they both use the same brand of contraceptive.

The failure of that fallible device leads to a nightmare of abortion in which Horner's doctor is revealed as the evil destroyer of life, spirit and flesh. Existentialism and pragmatism have had it at the hands of a calculating crank.

Comedy of Manners. Author Barth is assistant professor of English at Penn State and, unlike most teachers of English, he likes words well enough to play with them after school. His first novel, The Floating Opera, was runner-up for the 1957 National Book Award in fiction. Now The End of the Road reveals him as a very funny (but notably unfrivolous) writer.

Barth has a good ear for the sort of psychologizing claptrap that passes for conversation in some circles. The earnest talk of the three academic friends is a comedy of manners in itself--almost on the level of Mary (The Groves of Academe) McCarthy or Randall (Pictures from an Institution) Jarrell. Barth is clearly one of the more interesting of younger U.S. writers and he has produced that rarity of U.S. letters--a true novel of ideas.

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