Whether or not we are ever so rewarded, most of us believe we deserve a sabbatical, a time outside the scheme of our lives to rest and ruminate, to reckon how far we have come and, if we're lucky, to recognize where we must go. That's the theory, anyway. It is also the earnest hope of Fenwick Scott Key Turner, 50, and Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, 35, in their seventh year of marriage and in John Barth's seventh work of fiction [Sabbatical], as they cut loose on a year's cruise from their native Chesapeake Bay to the Yucatan and the West Indies and home again.

These two are no idle dreamers, for whom forced indolence would be unnecessary. Fenn, as he's called, is a career CIA officer some years lapsed; in the time since his retirement from active duty he has tried to make peace with himself, if not with the agency, by publishing a devastating exposé of its clandestine services division, one of several such tell-alls to appear in the 1970s. Now he is contemplating his next move. A novel? A professorship? An eternity of sailing?

So too is Susan contemplating her future. She teaches English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and carries with her an offer to join the faculty of Swarthmore at sabbatical's end. She also carries a disconcerting urge to bear children before her biological clock runs out. Such are the competing possibilities Fenn and Susan entertain at sea….

Sabbatical purports to be their running notes, recorded during the last weeks of spring, 1980, as their 33-foot sailboat Pokey tacks and reaches its way from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, island by island, toward home. The exact location and nature of "home," to be sure, is one of those vexing uncertainties the narrative entertains.

Although the novel is no retrogression, stylistically or thematically, for Barth, it does respect those rudiments of storytelling Barth has been willing to sacrifice of late. He attends to characters and the illumination of their drama more scrupulously and straightforwardly than in anything he has written since his first pair of novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. As a consequence, Sabbatical lodges itself firmly in our imaginations and memories—and it is a pleasure to read besides.

A significant pleasure is the one the lovers share. Life aboard Pokey is heaven on … well, not even on earth….

Morning swims in secluded coves and evening constitutionals on forgotten islets; lunches of grilled lamb chops, cheese, grapes, and cold Saint-Estèphe followed by languid lovemaking and the separate pleasures of The New York Review of Books (for her) and The Tempest (for him, for the hundredth time). It is a wonder their predicament has any urgency at all; it is a delicate accomplishment of Barth's fine novel that it does. (p. 4)

Those who have come to know Barth through his most recent novels should rest assured. Time has not healed his tic of overweening cleverness or his predilection for authorly commentaries on the story at hand. Because this is a record of the couple's sea journey, it is also a record of its own composition. Fenn and Susan argue incessantly about the proper way to tell the story, dispute the timing or pertinence of flashbacks, and remind one another of the literary traditions into which their narrative falls. The novel is littered with footnotes. Reality and illusion, of course, are forever at issue.

Yet the self-consciousness of the sabbatical exercise somehow is congenial to this sort of playfulness. Fenn and Susan have a curious but utterly convincing respect for the story they are making together, as if they had given it a life and will of its own. Indeed, they seem to look to its independent momentum for guidance in the great decisions they must make.

Fenn's career in intelligence is not merely a curiosity of his background. The specter of espionage lurks at every turn in their cruise. Fenn's twin brother Manfred was also an agency operative until he drowned in the Chesapeake Bay from a fall—or a push—from the selfsame Pokey. The resemblance to the real-life death of the CIA's John Paisley under circumstances of like mystery is not merely oblique here; the Paisley saga is laid out in nearly 20 pages of news accounts drawn verbatim from back issues of The Sun in Baltimore.

Barth's fascination with this sort of thing is logical enough. Author and agency share a fondness for elaborate deceptions, and like to muddle conspiracy and coincidence. Such intellectual sport may be said to represent the Washington component of this tale of two cities; the Baltimore component, as you might guess, is straight from the heart—and more knowing and affecting by far.

Susan's mother Carmen is an eccentric restaurateur in the Fells Point section of that city, and the mistress of a household circus. (pp. 4, 12)

Sabbatical, come to think of it, is a long meditation on family, from Carmen's delightful theories about sperms and eggs (that they are our real children, and the fruits of their union actually our grandchildren) to Fenwick's brainstorms about creation and procreation to Susan's outbursts about affairs and abortions—and motherhood….

Has Barth gone all soft and gooey on us after all this time? I think not. Like his characters, he is coming home to primordial things, and understanding them in new ways. Sixteen years ago he published an extraordinary story called "Night-Sea Journey." It is narrated by a sperm—"tale-bearer of a generation"—as it thrashes its way to an inexorable and holy union with an egg, from which will come "some unimaginable embodiment of myself." Sabbatical is a full-length reprise of that story, an examination of mortality and human purpose in the face of humble and ambiguous choices. It wonders aloud whether one's pride and joy in life need be one's flesh and blood, whether being a bearer of tales isn't embodiment enough. (p. 12)