Coming Sunday in The Sun: John Barth
Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, you'll find a review of John Barth's latest novel, The Development (Houghton Mifflin / 167 pages / $23). Reviewer Diane Scharper begins by saying that in this book of nine interlocking short stories Barth "crams his prose with narative tricks, literary allusions, figurative language and dirty jokes. Al though the results can be head-spinning, they are also funny and tragic -- at the same time. ... "Barth (winner of the National Book, the PEN/Malamud and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement awards) sets these narratives in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay country in the fictional retirement community of Heron Bay. Calling the book a projected history, Barth describes the Eastern Shore in James Michener-like detail in each one of these tales.
"So it’s nearly impossible not to know the setting of Barth’s fictional landscape. But it’s harder to know what’s happening, who’s talking and what’s the point. Barth offers alternate endings and even alternate narrators who jump into and out of the story. He plays games with the elements of fiction, establishing and destroying the illusion of reality.
"Welcome to the world of postmodern metafiction, with its subject being the art of telling a story — not the characters or what they do, not even the setting."
