the book, one prepared by the previous chapter with the subtle introduction of some passing naturalistic detail. Though he shows concern for verisimilitude—particularly in the immediacy of the abortion scene—Barth at times draws attention to the artifice of the writing. Jake recounts long conversations with Rennie or Joe that he points out never occurred as written—he has ordered and condensed their content. Jake also expresses a belief that was to manifest itself in Barth's later approach to writing: "To turn experience into speech, that is, to classify, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of it, a falsification of it". Primary characters Reception and legacy A 1958 Time magazine review called The End of the Road "that rarity of U.S. letters—a true novel of ideas". In the Chicago Review in 1959, reviewer David Kerner called it an "ideological farce", a genre he considered a "special type" with few contemporary examples. George Bluestone in 1960 used the term "serious farce", calling it an emerging new genre. Kerner praised Barth's "coherence of ... allegory", "depth of ... feeling for ideology", and "excellence of intention", but argues that the work's realistic style is at odds with the farcical, two-dimensional characters, who lack a "human and social setting" to give them roundedness and credibility. To Thomas LeClair in 1973, the novel was Barth's "purest presentation of the comedy of intellectual abstraction". As part of a cast that includes characters from each of Barth's first six books the characters Jake and Joe resurface in Barth's 1979 novel LETTERS on the Doctor's Remobilization Farm, relocated to Fort Erie, Ontario. The End of the Road is presented in that book as a discarded manuscript Jake had titled What I Did Until the Doctor Came. Barth's fictitious version of himself in LETTERS uses the manuscript as the basis for The End of the Road; decades later he writes to Jake of his appropriation, and of the film based on the book, calling the latter "as false to the novel as was the novel to your Account and your Account to the actual Horner–Morgan–Morgan triangle". Jonathan Lethem wrote of the influence The End of the Road had on his novel As She Climbed Across the Table (1997), which also involves a love triangle in an academic setting. In Lethem's novel, the narrator, in a position similar to Joe Morgan's, experiences the dilemma of "losing a woman