I remember that at one point I knew several John Barth fans. They would go on and on about The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy, but I could never get very far with either book.

But then I tried The End of the Road, Barth’s first novel, which was much shorter than his later (and hipper) books. It was interesting, it definitely held my interest, and so I went on to try The Floating Opera (his second, still shorter than the later ones). Which I also enjoyed.

The Floating Opera was very different from The End of the Road. The mood was much lighter, and it was (as I remember it) quite funny in spots. But it seemed familiar somehow, and then I realized that it had the same plot as The End of the Road. The actual story was very different, because the protagonists were very different, but the basic story was the same. This made both books more interesting.

I thought of this recently when watching Woody Allen’s Match Point. I had missed it when it was in theaters, but then I saw Scoop, which I enjoyed, and many people said Match Point was better, so I rented it.

Spoilers follow.

Several of the reviews I read of Scoop mentioned that it was sort of a comedic version of the more serious Match Point. Both were set in London, and both starred Scarlett Johansson. The reviewers said that Scoop was clearly an attempt to repeat the success of the earlier (and better) film, by rehashing it as a minor comedy.

But I don’t think that was the point. The point is the image at the beginning of Match Point, of the tennis ball poised on top of the net. In that instant, it can go either way, and that small piece of luck can decide everything. Because these two movies, like the two Barth novels, have basically the same plot.

A successful upper class man is having an affair, and the woman starts to threaten his comfortable life. So, he kills her. At one point, he tells his lover that he is going out of town, but he doesn’t go. Then she sees him, and knows he lied. At another point, he leaves a piece of jewelry somewhere by accident, and this leads to somebody making an incorrect deduction about the crime.

But, as I said, one is a comedy and one is a drama (completely artificial classifications, of course, which apply to fiction but not to life). In one, the man gets away with the crime, in the other he doesn’t. One is told from his point of view, and the other is told from his lover’s point of view. But they are the same story, which is the point.

I enjoy that sort of thing, at least partly because it’s so different from how I think and work. I don’t plot in advance (obviously), I don’t structure stories to make points, I don’t have a single point of view (except for Marshall, from time to time, but he’s usually more of an observer than a protagonist), and I never think in terms of “comedy” or “drama” (or “romance” or “adventure”).