With Sabbatical John Barth confirms that he has joined the ranks of the Old Poops. A useful category this, invented by Kurt Vonnegut for purposes of self-description. OPs are writers who once upon a time were prodigally talented, funny and full of bright and savage ideas, but have now "mellowed" into premature anecdotage; cuddly, avuncular, sermonizing old buffers, whose main text is how, once upon a time … etc, since of course OPs are nothing if not self-aware. Self-awareness was one of the tricks that made their writing so exciting in the 1960s, and now it provides them with a kind of narrative afterlife, "on in death like hair and fingernails" as Barth wrote less than ten years ago in Chimera, his last book before the onset of OP-hood. OPs have not become conservative exactly, but they're into conservation; in fact their central preoccupation is survival, simply going on (and on).
The cold war ethos OPs helped to dissipate in their early, euphoric period of fictive gamesmanship now once again dominates the mental weather. Our hero in Sabbatical, one Fenwick Scott Key Turner, is an ex-CIA man turned aspiring writer, resignedly aware that the Company's account of so-called reality, which had seemed shattered into a thousand and one quite different stories, is well on the way to reassembling itself…. Writing becomes a variety of salvage operation—not, this time, as in Barth's last tome, Letters, a matter of resurrecting all one's old characters and themes and lining them up to be counted, but a smaller scale enterprise, a case of cordoning off a modest corner where the minimal imaginative properties (a Muse, a Mythical Monster) can live.
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