Disclaimer: the book I’m about to describe to to you was created as, for better or worse, an exercise in absurdism. Critics of a certain camp have deemed it “immoral,” “fake,” and “excruciatingly self-conscious”; others hail it as a “postmodern classic.”

From personal experience, I can provide the following advice for reading it: consider keeping a bottle of Advil handy. You’ll thank me later.

Back to that phrase I used a moment ago - “postmodern.” It’s a scary word, at least to me. It’s generally used to describe a school of literary though that rose to prominence following World War II, one delineated by a complete disregard for the traditional “novel” and its conventions. Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don Delillo, and Italo Calvino all exemplify the form.

I usually tend to steer clear of writers like this, writers who seem to have only one goal in mind: that of perverting the english language beyond the limits of linguistic decency. But I’ve recently found an exception in the catalogue of John Barth.

Barth’s seminal work Lost in the Funhouse lives up to its title in that reading it truly does feel wandering through a hall of mirrors. The opening “story” isn’t so much a “story” as it is a gimmick, consisting of two pages, each with a single phrase printed vertically along its border. The phrase “ONCE UPON A TIME THERE” is mirrored on the opposite page by “WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN”; the reader is instructed to cut, twist, and tape the two strips into a Möbius strip, thus forming an endless, looping line of text.

From there the rest of the book assumes a more traditional narrative format (i.e. becomes not only readable, but enjoyable) while retaining the same spirit of absurdity. Sperm cells, siamese twins, Greek gods, Barth himself; each successive narrator is more unhinged than the last, and - somewhat appropriately, as the reader ventures deeper into in Barth’s hall of mirrors - the narrative begins to distort beyond recognition. A slight hysteria begins to set in. It quickly becomes apparent that what you are reading is the literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. What’s not to love? —Jackson Todd