The Development – Nine Stories by John Barth – Review

The Development by John Barth

The conventional wisdom about childhood, made memorable in L. P. Hartley’s phrase, is that “the past is a foreign country.” But it’s a country so much touristed in literary retrospect that we begin to think we really know what it was like. If we’re old enough to read, we have a stake in the matter; we’re inter­ested. This might be less true for the ­other, antipodean place, at the edge of Shakespeare’s “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” We may all hope to get to old age, but slowly, with leisured circumspection, and few of us are in a great hurry to study the brochures. The writer who takes the declining years as his subject matter is sailing into the wind.

Book Review – ‘The Development – Nine Stories,’ by John Barth – Review – NYTimes.com.