Life in the Fap Lane

It has been alleged on more than one occasion that the fiction of John Barth is “masturbatory.” This isn’t only because Barth loved a dirty joke, although he certainly did. To wit, one of first things readers will notice when diving into his 806-page tome The Sot-Weed Factor—a ribald parody of eighteenth-century picaresques first published in 1960 and to be reissued this coming May by Dalkey Archive Press—is that Barth has a fondness for smutty proverbs (“there are more ways to the woods than one”), double entendres delivered with a rimshot (“Hell hath no fouler, filthier Demon / Preserve me, lord, from English seamen!”), and, yes, groan-inducing masturbation jokes (“that same knuckly hand that penned him his couplets took no wooing to make his quick mistress”).