After the slow-grinding, interlocking minutiae of Letters, John Barth may have thought that his readers deserved a breather, and he's given them one: Sabbatical. Set largely on a sailboat nosing along the chops of the Chesapeake Bay, Sabbatical is a chummily facetious scribble about a former CIA officer and his sweetie and all the weird, wacky things that happen to them "twixt stern and starboard." Like other Barth novels, this one ladles on the Maryland lore: the tweeting couple is named Fenwick Scott Key Turner and Susan Seckler (nicknamed "Black-Eyed Susan," after the Maryland state flower), and their sailboat is dubbed Pokey, in honor of those two Baltimore legends Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. A comical twosome, Fenwick and Susie trade teasing wisecracks like a nautical Sonny and Cher, announcing flashbacks and flash-forwards, unfurling digressive reminiscences, bringing chapters to a close as if cutting to a commercial. (p. 16)

As their voices crisscross on the page, the novel seems to be broadcasting in stereo, with static crackling from each speaker. The static is set off by the noisy busyness of Barth's language: the clever-boots names (Eastwood Ho, Edgar Allan Ho), the sudden bursts of alliteration ("bald, brown, bearded, barrelchested" is how Barth describes Fenwick, while Susan is "sunburnt, sharp, and shapely"), the clickety-clack interior rhymes of—well, this: "Fenwick steadies the tiller in the crack of his ass and trims the starboard genoa sheet for the new tack." Barth also busies up his text with footnotes, mock headlines, and clippings about the CIA scissored from the Baltimore Sun.

For all its snappy patter and kissy-poo antics, however, Sabbatical soon proves to be a chirruping ode to nothingness…. As in the story "Night-Sea Journey,"… the ruling conceit of this novel of the upward swim of sperm toward ovum, a teeming migration beset with strife…. So the thinning-out of sperm becomes a metaphor for the absurd random chanciness and epic waste of life itself, with an added peril tossed in: abortion…. "Stories can abort, too," Susan tells Fenn. "Plenty are stillborn; most that aren't die young. And of the few that survive, most do just barely." Slain fetuses, decimated sperm—creation in Sabbatical is one long trail of casualties and squelched possibilities.

Sex continues to exact a punishing toll long after all that prepartum turmoil. Pages of squirming detail are devoted to the mutilations of Susan's twin sister Miriam, who one Sunday afternoon in 1968 is gang-raped by a pack of motorcyclists…. [Only] to be tortured again by a "rescuer" who peppers her body with cigarette burns and eventually leaves her kneeling in the dirt, a beer bottle sticking out of her assaulted bottom. Staggering out of the woods, reeking of sweat, blood, and dried urine, Miriam is raped again by a burly dude in a pickup trick.

When Fenwick makes unconvincing clucking noises of concern and tries to subdue Susan's too-graphic account, saying, "The details are just dreadfulness …," she disagrees: "Rape and Torture and Terror are just words; the details are what's real." But the details too are mere words, and the accumulation of sadistic flourishes only serves to distance us from the experience, to turn it into a virtuoso literary exhibition—a novelistic form of knife-juggling. Whether it's a horse being subjected to squealing anguish in Virginie or a woman running a rapist gauntlet in Sabbatical, the horror seems to derive less from life than from the author's desire to furnish his novel with showy scenes of blood and humiliation. The horror is so clumsily and shamelessly stage-managed that you end up feeling not so much pity or terror for the victims (who are simply used as straw dogs), as a mild lurch of disgust at the authors for misapplying their talent so. They give in to sadism dutifully, like apprentice floggers. Perhaps it's fussily old-fashioned of me, but I prefer humming sensations to deadened nerves, pleasure and play to defilement, firm footing to these drifting, sealed-off islands of nothingness. Sade is a master only for those intellectualized out of their wits.

But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that what's wrong with these novels is that they defame the dignity of life (whatever that is) or violate John Gardner's notions of what constitutes moral fiction. Reviewing The Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell praised Stevens's intelligence and cool mastery but lamented that "it would take more than these to bring to life so abstract, so monotonous, so overwhelmingly characteristic a book." What's sapping about these books is that they too are so characteristic. Once again John Hawkes has given us a novel loaded with soiled sex, acres of a damp rot, and bird and flower imagery…. Once again John Barth has tricked up a novel which mimics the stratagems that go into the tricking-up of a novel. (pp. 16-17)