In the no man's land of contemporary fiction, Barth has always been a willing occupier of the trenches, a writer concerned both to advance and defend, and this posture has given us works both of great interest and unevenness. His newest, Sabbatical, continues the pattern of engagement and stands as a worthy effort, if a flawed one. As with the earlier novels so with this one: the false starts and rough edges in Sabbatical derive not at all from a lack of skill but rather from the difficulties inherent in juggling diverse rhythms and mixed modes. Some of the features of the new novel remind one of other postmodern writing and also of the asymmetries and unresolved tensions in mannerist art as it sought to move out of the high Renaissance. Sabbatical explores anew Barth's long-standing interest in the way in which writer, text and reader interact, in how these swirling, buzzing energies achieve a momentary stability in a work of fiction. And not unexpectedly, the new novel probes certain genre considerations as well. It is said to be a "Romance" and part of the intellectual game of the work lies in the reader's recognition of how it modifies, negates and parodies this genre. Sabbatical is about a number of matters, and one of these is John Barth on Northrop Frye. Peace.

At plot level the work narrates the adventures of its principals, Fenwick Scott Key Turner and wife Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, as they return from a nine month cruise to the Caribbean aboard their motorized sailboat. The two took their voyage in order to take stock of themselves and life, but they return home to find that some important questions remain unanswered. Reality, Barth pleasantly reminds us, eludes definition just as "real" fictional characters escape the constraints and abstractions of literary typology. In their journey up Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and home port aboard the Pokey, Fenn and Susan gradually realize that "homecoming" is more a beginning than an ending. Enroute they encounter an uncharted island, a "sea monster," and—more crucially—themselves in their desolation, dreams and love. In the process the reader learns a good deal about the respective families—the mysteries, aspirations and tragedies in the lives of figures such as Manfred, Miriam, Carmen, Dumitru and others—and also about the ravaged, brutal, sterile nature of contemporary America. CIA intrigues (Fenn is a former member), gang rapes, mysterious disappearances and the moral complexities of abortion (Susan's) emerge as manifestations of our waste land, reminders that leviathan swims inscrutably onward. Clearly the "fresh, green breast of the new world" remains as elusive in Sabbatical as it was in Gatsby, but there is a compensation in Barth's novel. Unlike Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, Fenn and Susan manage to sustain a loving, sexually satisfying and intellectually vibrant relationship. Their "romance" (perhaps the real meaning of the subtitle) endures because of the pair's sense of humor, mutual forbearance and maturity—and of course because John Barth adds to these virtues the mana of art. Susan and Fenwick shape their story as they sail the waters of Chesapeake Bay and Americana; a significant part of their virtu flows from the fact that they are "makers" as well as sufferers.

Sabbatical is a "Romance," then, in the sense that it is an imitation of Romance, mythic and archetypal flights and perchings complete with a hero and heroine embarked on the necessary quest. At this level—perhaps loosely seen as the "allegorical" one—Susan and Fenn are tokens or types acting out their teleological imperatives. But there is more. For Sabbatical is also a novel in which "novelistic" energies assert themselves against the enervation and abstraction of the high mimetic. Fenn and Susan become "real" folk struggling with the unpredictability, messiness and absurdity of a culture deeply out of touch with itself—but still worth redemption. Ironically, it is at this level that the novel begins to lose the vigor it deserves but doesn't quite earn. For all their admirable qualities and the skillful orchestration of their eminently credible navigation of the "real" waters of the Bay, the two main characters tell us more about themselves than we finally want to know and the result is cloying. The heavy foregrounding of Susan and Fenwick is deliberate, a central strategy in the work's aesthetic, but it too often leads to a surfeit rather than to a vital accommodation. Sabbatical simply bogs down at times in cumbersome commentary and flat, somewhat coy, somewhat breezy characterization.

Not surprisingly to readers of Barth's earlier fictions, Sabbatical offers yet a further twist. As suggested above, Fenn and Susan are more than participants in a fictional structure; they also "compose" their own "story" and share their thoughts about this activity with the "reader." "John Barth," the putative author, fades into irrelevance as Fenn and Susan seemingly expropriate more and more of their creator's traditionally granted omniscience. The principals claim their freedom both from the allegorical and the authorial. In effect they become the fabricators of their own life story and thus stand outside both the mythic/Romance dimension of Sabbatical and the novelistic dimension. Real people twice removed from an imaginary voyage, so to speak. With John Barth put out to pasture and the fictive enterprise put on hold, at least temporarily, Fenn and Susan affirm their own being and freedom and immediacy: "The doing and the telling, our writing and our loving … That's our story." As the novel nears its end, the two figures also come to understand that the actual voyaging—not the goal—is what matters. (p. 19)

Critics such as Gerald Graff to the contrary, there is a postmodern movement alive in the world today; and John Barth's newest novel provides evidence of it. Not that Barth is on the frontier of experimentalism but rather that he substantiates and reflects the reality of certain fundamental—if albeit not yet adequately defined—changes, gestures, attitudes. This reviewer for one regrets that Barth didn't succeed better in his newest effort. A novel lives or dies on its ability to immerse the reader in a sustained experience—whether illusional or mimetic or antirealist and refractive—and Sabbatical too often lets its internal dynamic get in the way of this. (p. 20)