Now that the postmodernists have had their day, it’s not surprising that their favorite stylistic tricks are beginning to seem as quaint and mannered as the wave-swept rocks, ruined monuments and bottomless lakes of the Romantics.
John Barth is probably the preeminent living postmodern writer; his latest book, “The Development,” features most of the high jinks we’ve come to expect from that literary movement: There’s the same event narrated in different styles and the story within the story that is self-referential, self-contradicting and immersed in literary theory.
There’s the inevitable double for the author: Like his creator, Sam Bailey is a tall, thin, bald, bearded, beret-wearing retired professor; and like his creator, he tends to go on about whatever’s bugging him.
It’s a sign of postmodernism’s exhaustion that these tricks are the weakest and most disposable parts of the book. At the heart of “The Development” is a compassionate, sharply observed realistic work of fiction about growing old.
“The Development” is a sequence of interlinking stories about the residents of Heron Bay Estates, a gated community on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. All white, retired or semi- retired, and prosperous, the residents are, as one of them puts it, “not so much depressed by the prospect of their imminent old age as subdued by it.”
They fill their days with cocktail parties, bird-watching and a series of halfhearted self-improvement projects. Neither estranged from nor especially close to their now middle-aged children, they nevertheless make careful provisions for them in their wills, as well as for various charities.
Reviewing their wills leads them to a renewed contemplation of their impending decline: “. . . the inevitable downsizing from the house and grounds and motorboats and cars that they’d taken years of pleasure in; the physical and mental deterioration that lay ahead for them; the burden of caregiving through their decline; the unimaginable loss of a life- partner . . . ”
In the course of the novel’s 15-year span, the residents who survive make the inevitable transition from being older to elderly and from a gated community to an assisted-living one. Relating the thoughts of a 70-year-old man as he readies himself for a toga party, Barth beautifully describes how our sense of the passage of time accelerates as we age:
“Only a dozen or so Septembers left. How (to) assimilate it? On the one hand the period between birth and age fourteen had seemed to him of epochal extent and that between fourteen and twenty-eight scarcely more so: nonexistence to adolescence! Adolescence to maturity, marriage, and parenthood! But his thirties, forties, and fifties had passed more swiftly decade by decade, no doubt because his adult life-changes were fewer and more gradual than those of his youth. And his early sixties — when he’d begun the gradual reduction of his office workload and the leisurely search for a weekend retreat . . . seemed the day before yesterday instead of twelve-plus years ago.”
The assisted-living community is vividly sketched with grim precision and gallows humor. Be warned, a resident says, it’s college dorm life all over again — at age 80!
These passages rank “The Development” next to powerful works such as Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Coming of Age” and Ronald Blythe’s “The View in Winter,” works that describe old age and death unflinchingly and without false uplift. But Barth, the old postmodernist, is suspicious of the strong emotions that literature can stir up and can’t help reminding us that this is just a work of fiction:
“In a proper Story, one would by now have some sense of a Situation: some latent or overt conflict . . . the action of which is felt to be building strategically to some climax or satisfying denouement.”
He garlands “The Development” with a series of unlikely and farcical occurrences to remind us not to get too involved in the story: The toga party ends in not one but three attempted Roman-style suicides; there’s a peeping Tom in the neighborhood who, it’s strongly implied, could be, like the narrative, a figment of someone’s imagination.
Also, a chapter on an academic competition is a tiresome lesson in literary indeterminacy. And if, at the end of the book, the author chooses to destroy his lovingly crafted sandcastle, well, that’s one of the privileges writing fiction offers.
John Broening is a Denver-based freelance writer.
Fiction
The Development by John Barth, $23
