'There was a story that began—' begins Sabbatical, and the story is then interrupted for two nights and a day by a storm at sea, itself interrupted by a dialogue on Aristotle's distinction between lexis and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in a holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely realistic: it is full of information, for instance, about sailing in the Chesapeake Bay…. Sabbatical is as devotedly a novel about sailing as The Riddle of the Sands; and like that rather staid classic it uses a sailing trip to get its crew involved in a real-life mystery story. Where Erskine Childers was writing about the Kaiser's invasion plans, Barth is writing about the CIA. An island not on the charts, a shot in the morning mist, deaths and disappearances occur, to a running commentary of texts and footnotes documenting CIA practices. And then there's realism of a more sociological cast, in a trip ashore to Susan's family at Fells Point, Baltimore. The period is almost exactly that of John Updike's last Rabbit novel, and one recognises the same obsession with the placing of America at a moment in time—the stuff in the shops, the news items, the current stresses of family life, the curious national mood of confidence combined with irony, shame and foreboding.
But this novel is capacious. A legendary sea-monster appears, looking no more out of place than the one in Phèdre. Fenwick and Susan—he an aspiring writer, she a professor of classic American literature—have literary imaginations; and symbolism out of Poe and erudition about luc-bát couplets in Vietnamese oral poetry help to feed the fantasy…. When not fully employed in sailing the boat, they have weird dreams in common, which include flashbacks and flashes forward. Or again, at the same healthy level as the sailing, this is also a love story: a shipboard romance after seven years of marriage…. Realism does its job, so that when they conclude that their story has their love in it, this is convincing. A happy love story is a rare event in the Post-Modernist novel.
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