Existentialist Comedian

Before an author's works are reprinted in anything but paperback, he is usually dead, or his books have come to be considered classics--or both. John Earth, 36, is alive, and none of his books have yet reached the classical shelf. He has written four novels--The Floating Opera, End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy. The first three together sold fewer than 8,000 copies. Goat-Boy, the only one that can be called a popular success, sold about 50,000 and showed up briefly on the bestseller lists. Despite this inconclusive reception, The Sot-Weed Factor has now been republished (Doubleday; $7.50), and Earth's first two novels will also be reissued, all in hardcover. What gives?

What gives is an author who knows that ideas make the best parlor games. Earth's books, whatever their shortcomings, cry out not merely to be read but to be played with. His friend, Novelist and Critic Leslie Fiedler, enthusiastically calls Earth "an existentialist comedian." The description is apt, for Earth is essentially a humorist who believes that it is absurdly comical to take anything too seriously, including himself. His books bubble with back-alley sexual humor that derides the solemnity of love. Earth's characters are never cast as heroes: there is something slightly ludicrous about them all. That is not new, but Earth sustains those characters with exceptional force and conviction, as if he were trying to enlarge the ludicrous to epic proportions. "Where the hell else but in America," asks one of his characters, "could you have a cheerful nihilism?" Earth is a bit of a nihilist about the novel itself; he is convinced that it is a dying literary form.

Quandary. Earth's four books trace the systematic progress of the anti-novelist. The author began conventionally enough with The Floating Opera and End of the Road, both written when he was 24. In the first, Lawyer Todd Andrews, deeply disturbed by his father's suicide, decides that nothing in life has much meaning; he makes up his mind to follow his father's example. But the decision sets its own quandary: "If nothing makes any final difference, that fact makes no final difference either, and there is no more reason to commit suicide, say, than not to." It is the logical dilemma that so many existentialists run into. In the end, Andrews elects to live, or at least to go on existing.

A search for life's meaning also runs through End of the Road. "In a sense, I am Jacob Horner," the book's narrator begins, with typical uncertainty. Then he conducts a tour along the "weatherless" days of his life. Hornet suffers low-pressure areas during which he ceases to function. Hypnotized by the multitude of life's choices, he can make no choice at all. The novel is partly autobiographical. It is laid in Maryland, where Earth grew up; Horner teaches English at Wicomico State Teachers College, while Earth teaches English at the Buffalo campus of New York State University.

After Swift. Once past these impressive apprentice works, Earth abandoned all allegiance to the novel's disciplines; he set out to exploit the form's deficiencies by overdoing them. Whatever else it is, Giles Goat-Boy is also an attempt to deride the novel. In form, it resembles-a Swiftian satire in which the world becomes a collection of university campuses, with effects that are sometimes uproarious, sometimes too heavy and mechanical (TIME, Aug. 5). Where Swift tore savagely at the fabric of his time, Earth remains deliberately neutral, mocking tradition-bound literature as much as he mocks mankind.

The same is true of The Sot-Weed Factor, now back in the book stores in hard-cover after seven years. It is a farcical tour de force in which the author deliberately tried to create "a more contrived plot than Tom Jones." Implausible coincidence, Rabelaisian romps, confused identities--all the traditional trappings of the picaresque novel are exaggerated to the point of burlesque. Factor also dips resolutely into history--as reconstructed by Earth in confusing detail. Colonial Maryland is revised to suit his fancy; he recounts the legend of Pocahontas as a tale so bawdy that Boccaccio himself might have blushed. "I love colonial history," he explains. "It's nightmarish black humor."

Publish or Perish. As he reaches farther and farther for new literary forms, Earth is actually going back to the literary past. When he was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, he devoured everything from Burton's Thousand and One Nights to the Gesta Romanorum, and he developed a strong affection for such classic cyclical tales, which preceded the novel by centuries. He is the first to admit that his new books owe something to that old form. "My affair with Scheherazade is an old and continuing one," Earth once wrote. "Consider that in the years of her flourishing, her talent is always on the line: night by night it's publish or perish."

No such necessity drives Earth. His life, unlike his fiction, is remarkably low-key. He seems unconcerned by the way public or critics receive his books. A tall, unassuming man with a prematurely bald head and an understated mustache, he has an arrangement with the university that allows him to keep a light academic load. The rest of his time is devoted to writing, to his wife and three children, and to an occasional session with a neighborhood jazz combo. A dropout orchestration student at Juilliard, Earth now beats the drums.

In his continuing and demonic commitment to explore the terrain beyond the novel, Earth is moving in several directions at once. "I've thought of writing all the stories I've ever known in ten volumes," he says, or threatens. And he has begun to investigate, as a non-typist investigates the typewriter, the possibility of adding the author's voice, on tape, to the printed word. "People tend to turn to the sound of their own voices, and this fact of life could be a literary device."

Farthest out of all, perhaps, he has written a story, as yet unpublished, in which the story itself plays a leading role. "Think of how the story must feel about being a story," he says. Or more to the point, how the story must feel about John Earth.

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