APF

egan as a more “sportive” affair, Graybard informs us in the “Invocation,” was altered when he
realized that “for him to re-render now, in these so radically altered circumstances, Author’s
eleven mostly Autumnal and impossibly innocent stories, strikes him as bizarre, to put it mildly
indeed—as if Nine Eleven O One hadn’t changed the neighborhood.”
Barth seems to have bought into the notion, perpetrated by some after the events of
9/11/01 that this day entailed a loss of credibility for the sort of postmodern fiction Barth’s work
prominently exemplified. But the charge made against postmodern irony was certainly not that it
was “innocent”; rather, it was all too knowing, too detached and clever by half in its preference
for stylistic and formal displays over engagement with reality. The call for writers to awaken
from their postmodern-induced slumber and acknowledge that reality is itself actually a bid to
return fiction to a state of literary innocence, to the belief that reality can be directly represented
in a work of fiction that sticks to the narrative basics. Book of Ten Nights and a Night winds up
mildly reaffirming the value of “irrelevant” stories in the face of real-world trouble, but a better
way to assert that value may have been to present these stories according to the original, less
fretfully earnest plan, the state of the “real world” outside the text notwithstanding.
The Development (2008) as well suggests a retreat from the most overt displays of
postmodern artifice and metafictional trickery. The book can be read as a more or less
conventional series of linked stories about a retirement community, Heron Bay Estates, that
houses its share of “autumnal resignation and quiet turmoil,” although Heron Bay’s ultimate
demise is far from quiet, as it is ravaged by a tornado spun off from a late-season tropical storm
moving up Barth’s cherished Chesapeake Bay. While the stories are not completely free of
passages meditating on the act of storytelling (it is still Barth, after all), The Development is
otherwise entirely accessible to most readers as a kind of slice-of-life realism depicting
American life as lived by those nearing its conclusion. Even the at times fustian mannerisms of
Barth’s late style, which particularly encumber Book of Ten Nights and a Night, is here toned
down to something closer to a conventional expository style.
The Development succeeds relatively well in what it sets out to do, although it is
inevitably disappointing that it sets out to do so little. It is of course not surprising that a writer
now in his mid-80s would turn to themes of aging and taking stock, but one might wish that
Barth had done so without defaulting to such conventional methods of presenting these themes.
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