"One of the joys of The Floating Opera is that it is a rambling, overstuffed first novel bearing as much ambition and stylistic frothiness as the more physically daunting [novels] that came later. . . . It's a good story. An engrossing one . . . even if the 'writer' does end up digressing and winking and leading the reader occasionally astray." –The Los Angeles Times
"The End of the Road is a darkly funny and strange interpretation of the university-campus novel, a kind of American spiritual cousin to Lucky Jim, with a dash of mock-existentialism and parody of Ayn Rand-style mid-century narcissism. . . . Barth plays many scenes for laughs, yet the story, which centers on Horner's rather blank search for a code by which to live, leads to a finale of unexpected violence and emotional force." –The New Yorker
"The End of the Road is a profound deliberation on the dominant Western philosophy of its time, existentialism, which Barth, in a Camus-like story of a marital affair, first seems to value and then exposes as obscenely inadequate." –The New York Times
