So:

At this late stage in his career, John Barth is probably in a kind of no-win situation. Those who identify him as a first-generation postmodernist, and have probably never had much admiration for postmodern fiction, anyway, will see every new work as an example of postmodernism's obsolescence. Thus Gregory Leon Miller proclaims that in Barth's most recent book, The Development, "Emotional moments - mortality is a major theme of the book - are undercut by narrative games that have become cliche, as narrators reveal themselves to be someone other than we were led to believe, and then someone else altogether. . .The tedium of these gestures strongly suggests that it is such postmodern fiction itself - at least in its purest, initially conceived form - that has run its course."

On the other hand, those who do consider themselves admirers of Barth's work are more likely to find a book like The Development, which undeniably is more accessible to the non pomo-inclined, disappointingly ordinary. Thus Christopher Sorrentino concludes that "Barth once talked about embracing 'another order of risk,' in which one would test one’s ability to hold an audience with narrative complexity. Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor."

Although I am more inclined to agree with Sorrentino in his judgment that The Development is "a modest addition to [Barth's] oeuvre," I can't quite agree that the portrayal of the gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore that is the focus of the nine stories comprising The Development bears comparison to Keillor-type sentimentality. Indeed, to the extent that Miller's criticism has validity--and only here does it have validity--it is true that Barth's fiction rarely lingers over "emotional moments" without resorting to distancing effects such as verbal irony or authorial self-reflexivity. While it might seem "conventional" for John Barth to write a sequence of stories about elderly couples trying to cope with the fact that the horizon line of their lives has come much closer, I don't think either the subject or the setting is inherently "hokum."

Indeed, the most emotionally unsettling moment in The Development occurs at the conclusion of "Toga Party," in which the story's husband and wife protagonists decide to gas themselves in their garage rather than continue on their life's "crappy last lap," as the husband puts it. The story is unsettling precisely because there really has been no emotional preparation for this almost spontaneous decision and because it is carried out with little emotional display:

. . .Already they could smell exhaust fumes. "I love you, Dick."

"I love you. And okay, so we're dumping on the kids, leaving them to take the hit and clean up the mess. So what?"

"They'll never forgive us. But you're right. So what?"

"We'll each be presumed to have survived the other, as the saying goes, and neither of us'll be around to know it."

The car engine quietly idled on.

"Shouldn't we at least leave them a note, send them an e-mail, something?"

"So go do that if you want to. Me, I'm staying put."

He heard her exhale. "Me, too, I guess." Then inhale, deeply.

It is true that this event has emotional resonance throughout the rest of the book--other characters refer to it, its possibility as the final act for these characters as well can't be dismissed--but I don't see how it can be taken as "a virtual Hallmark card for suicide." That people like the Fentons might indeed resort to this kind of clear-eyed suicide in the midst of modern "retirement" only seems to me an equally clear-eyed indictment of the very middle-class lifestyle to which almost all of the characters in the book have readily acceded, to one degree or another. There is a repressed but still palpable disappointment with the outcome of American "success" permeating The Development, not an affirmation of it.

Some of the characters are more resistant to the illusions of the American Way than others. At the end of "Progressive Dinner," about the annual Heron Bay Estates social, we are left with Peter Simpson, an associate dean at the local college:

From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God Bless America!"

Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.

So what? he asks himself.

So nothing.

Most of the characters are presented as financially comfortable and as having accomplished career success, but many of them don't seem to regard their careers as achieving anything very important. Some are outright failures, as for example George Newett, a creative writing professor at the same local college, who confesses to having published little and who settles for "trying to help others do better" than he did, although "as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement." None of them are held up as especially insightful, morally or intellectually. They may indeed be "bland," but this seems to me at least the natural outcome of their author's vision of Heron Bay Esates,the small but representative world John Barth wants to invoke.

Given the extent to which in The Development Barth has trimmed back what Gregory Leon Miller calls the "meta-fictional [sic] flourishes" for which Barth has become, at least to critics like Miller, infamous, it is rather astonishing that Miller would insist on charging it with "excessive self-reflexivity." There are a couple of stories--in particular, "The Bard Award" and "Rebeginnings"--that feature Barth's trademark dual emphasis on telling the story and on relating the story of the storytelling, which makes some of his most notoriously postmodern novels and stories more like narrative puzzles than narratives per se. But for the most part, the stories in The Development are surprisingly straightforward suburban slices-of-life joined together to create a surprisingly earnest work of late-life realism. One suspects that for readers like Miller, Barth could never be less than "excessive" unless he were to stop writing altogether or start being an utterly different kind of writer than the one he's always been.

One "self-reflexive" feature of the book that even Miller does not bring forward for censure, and that might be considered an addition of "narrative complexity," can be found in its title. "The Development," it seems to me, does not refer merely to the housing development itself, nor to the "development" of the characters' lives so far, but to "the development" as one of the elements of narrative. Most of the stories (except, of course, for "Toga Party") consist mostly of "development," most of them beginning in no particularly urgent situation and trailing off before the "tale" could be said to have reached its dramatic apex. "The End," which ostensibly tells the story of HBE's destruction by tornado doesn't actually narrate that catastrophe and registers the deaths of two of the community's members in just a couple of sentences. But this seems to me to reinforce the book's portrayal of the characters' "last lap." As Paul Lafarge puts it in his review of The Development, "The open-endedness of these stories is not mere trickiness. The tired reporters and washed-up teachers of creative writing in Heron Bay Estates are, like Barth himself, close enough to the end of their lives that the autobiographer's paradox is more than a theoretical worry. How do you tell the conclusion of your own story?. . .there is perhaps no better way to face the certainty that your own consciousness will cease, than with a defiant colon, so:"

Barth employs such a strategy of inconclusiveness, it seems to me, with particular skill in this book, so much so that its more subtle effects are apparently lost on his harsher critics who see only the more obvious "meta-fictional" touches.

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

Those dismissive, null-nuance readings have the too-sweet stink of the hipster to them: everything on the i-pod a must-have, wouldn't be caught dead in Prague or at a Fellini film, always on the lookout for the ideal Japanese future ex. This is what happens when the Top Ten list becomes an ethos. The hipster is the Kudzu of the critical conversation.

[Christopher Sorrentino]

I had, I believe, eight hundred words in which to review Barth’s book. If I was inadequate to the task of explaining, in so little space, why I felt the book fell short, then I offer a mea culpa, but I stand by the review’s conclusion. It’s not hostility to either “metafiction” or “postmodernism” (or Barth, for that matter) that fuels the review, but dismay with the way that Barth chose to deploy the techniques we associate with those things. I thought I’d made that much clear. The stories are like episodes of The Golden Girls (pace Bea Arthur) in which one of the characters fixes the camera, and us, with a knowing look, after which, in the next scene, something “touching” happens, and the “studio audience” says “Awwwwwwwwww.” I’ll repeat what I said in the review: Barth’s hedging his bets here. He wants us to admire the superficiality he’s created qua superficiality, but also wants us to be moved by transparent and klutzy manipulations of the plot, with none of the brutal elan one might reasonably expect of metafiction (no, subject and setting are neither inherently hokum nor resistant to metafictional treatment, as B.S. Johnson showed forty years ago in House Mother Normal). For that’s the major objection I have -- it’s certainly not that Barth is working in an “exhausted” mode (although we surely have seen him ring these very changes time and again), but that he’s hedging: he wants us to gasp delightedly when the “rules” are “broken,” yet he also wants us to be moved by these transparent and klutzy plot manipulations. And the deaths of the Feltons in “Toga Party” are indeed “moving” in a Hallmark kind of way. The couple engages death, “with little emotional display,” the way they might engage a round-the-world cruise. You seem to take this not as an effective literary strategy, but as an understandable life strategy. Would that it were so; that death might commonly come to the elderly in so neatly trite a way. “Should” it be so in fiction? Well, I’m sure Barth and I would agree that there are no “shoulds” in fiction. But I thought, Dan, after having read you for five years, that you were moved primarily by what the narrative did, not what it told you. And yet much of what you single out as admirable is both unsubtle and, uncharacteristically for you, plot-oriented. If you would like to call attention to a work of fiction on the basis of its ability to surprise us in terms of the linear movement of the story, for providing “no emotional preparation” for plot changes the author sets in motion, for a “clear-eyed indictment” of the “middle-class lifestyle,” for its “small but representative” (of what?) world, for its surprising earnestness, that’s fine -- but these are your, apparently revised (in view of those five years), criteria, not mine.

Steven, thanks for your wild, amusing, and thoroughly incorrect guesses about me, my enthusiasms and prejudices, and my guiding aesthetic. I might disagree with you and say that it's the comment box that's the true kudzu of the critical conversation -- but here I am. Though I also publish elsewhere.

[Dan Green]

Christopher: It's not your review I'm referring to as hostile to postmodernism. I didn't think The Development was sentimental, but clearly we did have a different response to this aspect of the book. My overall point in this post remains the first one: in shifting away from his more systematic use of self-reflexivity, Barth becomes vulnerable to the charge that he is selling out, trying to cultivate "mainstream" readers.

[Steven Augustine]

Chris:

No need to get literal-minded in your defense of the particulars of your lifestyle. My comment was directed at "readings"... plural. I was referring to the hipster phenom in aggregate; of course there are variations at an individual level. You don't even have to be a hipster to adopt a hipster register, though, in any case, it was more Miller's reading I was responding to. My point... that pop judgments are gumming up critical nuance... still stands. Re-read your response (above) for evidence of same and get back to me?

[Christopher Sorrentino]

I'm a little sensitive about the charge that I'm accusing Barth of selling out. I am probably more aware than most people of the plight of the Twilit Postmodernist and certainly Barth is well aware that his editors at Houghton have him fenced securely inside the demographic pen that will tolerate his work (he is no doubt equally well aware that he is fortunate to be published by Houghton in the present environment). And I have little doubt that in assigning the book to me, Albert Mobilio at BookForum thought he was assigning it to a sympathetic (or at least comprehending) reader -- which, really, I am. I merely (without repeating or elaborating on the above) thought it was an inferior effort, the implication being clear (I thought) that it was inferior particularly in comparison to the deeply significant work he has done throughout much of his career.

One other, small, point, that may be of interest to those curious about the ways that book reviews morph between delivery and publication -- in my original draft, the sentence you quote that reads, "Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor" originally read "...are bland enough to make Garrison Keillor on Lake Woebegon read like Sherwood Anderson on Winesburg." Albert asked me to change it, for perfectly fathomable reasons that I can't recall. The difference is slight but pertinent; despite the fact that as originally intended it may sound even more dismissive than as published, it was not my intention to directly compare Barth to Keillor, but to invoke the distance between The Development and the very high standard against which such a work from a writer as important as Barth should be set.

[Dan Green]

And I agree with the assessment you gave in your review: "a modest addition to [Barth's] oeuvre."

[Steven Augustine]

"A virtual Hallmark card for suicide—probably why Stephen King, a perfect judge of hokum, selected 'Toga Party’ for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2007—it's not even the best story in The Development."

So, this isn't pronounced in the register of the hipster? You know you're in trouble when Hallmark, Stephen King and Garrison Keillor are all mentioned in one 800-word review of your book! A positive review would have referenced "The Wire", I guess.

"One imagines Barth circling this material like a wolf around an untended sheepfold, but while it's to his credit that he doesn't take too many easy shots at this subdivided idyll, it's a problem that he doesn't really take any at all."

You're presuming that shot-taking is the proper goal here. By presuming to know the proper goal of the exercise, you've foreclosed on an open reading of the results. Dare I say that the need for a display of shot-taking is a hipster default?

Rather than providing an analysis of the mechanics of Barth's effort (and is it unhip of me to think that after such long, long service, the man deserves enough benefit of the doubt that the reviewer can assume the writer knows what he's doing? PS-this is no small effect; presuming the author knows what she/he's doing makes all the difference when he/she tries something risky), you critique the *tone*... for example, of this passage:

"A comfortable, fortune-favored life . . . ample pensions, annuity income, and a solid, conservative investment portfolio; not-bad health; no family tragedies; few really close friends (and no house pets), but no enemies. To be sure, they fear the prospect of old age and infirmity . . . but feel graced indeed with each other, with their family . . . their neighbors and neighborhood, and the worthy if unremarkable accomplishments of their past and present life."

The apparent presumption on your part being that writing about such characters without obvious shot-taking results in hokum. Would you be more comfortable if Barth wrote about crack addicts without shot-taking? Probably. But what's the difference, if we're not talking hipster shibboleths?

Barth's first mistake, obviously, was in choosing "unhip" subjects/settings. Make no mistake: the old, as a subject, are "unhip" (unless they're being mocked, or behaving, mysteriously, like the young).It was probably also a "mistake" for Barth to apply, perhaps, subtle/gentle/creeping ironies rather than the fire-alarm snark the reader/reviewer can get in one quick pass?

"Barth once talked about embracing 'another order of risk,' in which one would test one's ability to hold an audience with narrative complexity. Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor. At the crucial stage while tying the tie and telling the tale, Barth neglected to pull the knot tight."

*Perhaps the other order of risk Barth embraced here was using tools not normally associated with his brand?*

"I'm a little sensitive about the charge that I'm accusing Barth of selling out."

But what you're actually accusing him of, in your review, is the blunder of no longer being hip; he's now a boring old feller who doesn't know that his time in the spotlight is over:

"Barth's always been a charmer, although at nearly eighty years old he's more like the lovable old uncle who's been entertaining the kids with that necktie routine for about fifty years than the onetime vigorous advocate for 'passionate virtuosity.'"

Are you close-reading the text or reviewing Barth's relevancy (and his relevancy to which demographic)?

"I am probably more aware than most people of the plight of the Twilit Postmodernist... "

If you've got inside information on the fact that most people don't read, and that most of the ones who do read don't read well, and that most of the ones who read well don't have the time to exercise the talent, please spill it. The world wasn't full of people begging for "Postmodernism" forty years ago... but there were lots more open-minded readers (because there were lots more readers); readers who hadn't been conditioned, yet, by TV and trench-overrunning capitalism to expect (nay, demand) standardized experiences in *everything*.

The "plight of the Twilit Postmodernist" is simply the plight of the Artist who doesn't want to bow to the rigid strictures of mass entertainment. I might add that perhaps Barth doesn't want to bow to the rigid strictures of cult entertainment, either. Maybe he still wants to apply the tools he requires to the tasks he sets to himself?

[J.]

"If you've got inside information on the fact that most people don't read..."

Steven: It may be a bit presumptuous of me, but I take Christopher Sorrentino to mean that he is sensitive to the plight of older postmodern writers nowadays because his own father, Gilbert Sorrentino, never acquired the respect or the audience he deserved. He certainly never enjoyed the stature of his peers. I suppose he might know the toll it can take on someone to suffer critical neglect after years and years of producing great books--not that Sorrentino ever publicly bemoaned his situation (unless one wants to read Mulligan Stew as autobiography).

As for book reviewing, when exactly was its Golden Age? When you say that "pop judgments are gumming up critical nuance" I'm left to wonder when this wasn't the case. I agree with your general attitude toward the "hipster register," but it's simply part of the enduring legacy of the surface-oriented counterculture (the children of wealthy white baby-boomers, the hippies, are your hipsters). Before that it was the puritanical register of New York intellectuals. They both involve affectation and have more to do with what's fashionable than what's good literature. Your pithy assault on book reviewing reminds me of Armond White's take on movie reviewing, which also leaves me saying, "True, but...what's new?" I don't think Sorrentino is accusing Barth of no longer being hip, I think he's accusing him of falling back on cliches and abandoning, somewhat, narrative experimentation, which hasn't been "hip," in the world of literature at least, for about 40 years. It may, of course, be true that Barth is after something more subtle these days and needs to be read in a new light.

[Steven Augustine]

J:

A) "Twilit Postmodernist" is only a meaningful (if affectionate) pejorative if we're grading/tracking literary Art in the manner of pop music. Believe it or not, there are writers, even now, working on Artmaking without an eye towards Trends or Taxonomies or Bottom Lines. This involves a worldview to which many are smug and hostile. Is this hostility/smugness damaging to the culture's depth and vitality? I think so.

B) Yes, there was no "Golden Age" of reviewing... a point we've revisited dozens of times on TRE. But there were better times for readers of book reviews. Any argument there?

C) How do Christopher's life-experiences relate to his review/comments? Haven't a clue; I was restricting my responses to the texts at hand.