FICTION

In an essay that ran in The New York Times 22 years ago, John Barth famously celebrated the virtues of expansive prose. It was a heartfelt cry against the growing monopoly of tight-lipped minimalists such as Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie.

Against a tide of verbal anorexics, Barth has steadfastly hurled anchor-sized novels distinguished by their playful buoyancy as much as by their heft.

Ironically, Barth's new book, "The Development," has more in common size-wise with what he called "the three-eighth-inch novel" of the minimalists than it does with his "The Tidewater Tales" or "Giles Goat-Boy."

In fact, "The Development," a collection of nine linked stories set in a gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore, is five-eighths of an inch thick.

Take away the thick cover boards and you find yourself holding the three-eighth-inch holy grail of the minimalists.

Barth hasn't experienced a late-career conversion at the font of minimalism, though. He's still up to his old postmodern, metafictional tricks, and his prose is as buoyant as ever.

Barth also toys with larger issues in "The Development" -- among them, the mechanics of storytelling and our formal expectations as readers.

The narrator of "The End," for example, readily acknowledges that after several pages, his narrative is "no proper Story, only a chronicle," without conflict or at least tension, the elements of "a proper Story."

And the narrator of "Teardown" refuses to close his account with anything more than a list of optional endings from which we readers might choose, after which he pulls "its narrative plug before somebody gets hurt."

"The Development" is more approachable than some of Barth's more ambitious novels, though. No worry: No metafictional decoder ring (or master's degree in literary theory) is necessary to figure out what Barth is up to, this time.

That's not to say his achievements in "The Development" are linear.

On one level, the collection works as satire. Barth encourages us to laugh at his comfortably middle-class, reassuringly sheltered characters. We, he reminds us, know more than they. We, unlike the characters in "Toga Party," know what carpe diem means.

But Barth is a surprisingly gentle satirist, and his characters possess an endearingly human, fragile quality. They're quietly embittered, and their private lives are emptier than their well-appointed, well-maintained homes in Heron Bay Estates might suggest.

Postmodern play aside, these are stories of loss -- loss of family, youth, health and identity -- a fact which the characters struggle to conceal with forced good cheer. They live in the upscale, postmodern version of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," and their plights are, improbably, equally moving.

And that may be the most surprising discovery in a book whose author has taken a lifetime's pleasure in routing his readers through literary funhouses.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.