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Barth Is Back
Behind the gates of a gated community
with a modern master.
by Shawn Macomber
5/30/2009 12:02:00 AM, Volume 014, Issue 36
The Development
by John Barth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 176 pp., $23
During a 1960 lecture at Hiram College John Barth playfully pondered the novelist's "immodest and subversive resemblance to God." Nearly a half-century on, the Supreme Being incarnated via Barth's pen appears to be suffering fatigue--and not simply because, at 176 pages, the cosmos of His new collection of interrelated stories, The Development, is rather puny compared with the sprawling galaxies of much-heralded Barth tomes such as The Sot-Weed Factor (1960, 768 pp.) or Giles Goat-Boy (1966, 710 pp.).
No, the diagnosis has less to do with the number of bookshelf inches the tome occupies than with the divine delegation between the book's covers--extraordinarily lavish, even for a self-referential metafictionist like Barth.
Consider, for example, the following climax from an otherwise engrossing tale in The Development (spoilers redacted) in which a sexually aggressive undergrad simultaneously intrigues and scares the hell out of her English professor, a man past his artistic prime:
Should [main character] now commit his maiden adultery, so to speak, by humping one of his not-quite-ex students--at her initiative, to be sure, but still . . . --thereby blighting both his long happy marriage and his academic retirement, disgusting his colleagues and grown-up children, but perhaps reactivating (for what they're worth) his so-long-quiescent creative energies? And if so, so what? Or ought we to have the guy come to his moral senses (if necessary, since we've seen thus far no incontestable sign of his being seriously tempted by [redacted]'s flagrances) and not only decline her ...
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