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.

The official story, as it were, belongs to the CIA. You fit your narrative in the gaps and interstices, and round the edges. So middle-aged Fenn and his newish second wife Susan are discovered, when the book opens, returning from a nine month sabbatical cruise in their sailing yacht Pokey to home waters in the Chesapeake Bay, and looking around for ways of avoiding mainland America, staying metaphorically afloat and offshore.

The sea voyage motif, as Fenn and Susan (who is a professor of Am Lit), are very well aware, is the oldest one in the book, and that is its point. At times of stress it's best, goes the argument, to retreat to the fundamental formulae and reenact the mythic commonplaces. If the metaphors creak a bit and the story line seems a little slack, so much the better; there's something reassuring about being at the mercy of the old pattern, the narrative winds and tides. Why not return to innocence?…

Innocence is hard to come by. All very well for Fenn to antitheorize the life of the imagination—"realism is your keel and ballast of your effing Ship of Story and a good plot is your mast and sails. But magic is your wind"; however, it's not possible to remain out of sight of land. And as soon as you disembark the old Companyspeak starts doing very unrefreshing things to your figures of speech.

Take "cruise", for a start. Or much more sinister, "episode". This artless narratological ploy takes on a whole range of tangled, threatening meanings: for example, the cardiac "episode" or mini heart attack that sent Fenn off on his sabbatical in the first place, and that may, just may, reflect "the Company's rumoured new cardiac arrest capability", since they were naturally not too pleased with Fenn's first venture into the world of letters, a book exposing a small part of their grubby and multifarious dealings. All this we gather by way of "episode". And as the novel gets under way and starts to tack back and forth, more and more terrible and tacky and paranoid possibilities materialize. "Aspiration", as Susan will demonstrate, is a brisk technique for abortion.

The plot thickens alarmingly as we enter "the world of information, disinformation, even superdisinformed supercoded disinformation". Both Susan and Fenn turn out to be twins…. In short (in long, in truth, it's much more complicated) Fenn and Susan are intimately twinned with Right and Left America.

Indeed, since Fenn claims to be descended from the man who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner" (F. S. Key) and Susan, despite or because of being Jewish, inherits a family tradition that she is distantly related to Edgar Allan Poe (hence their boat's name, Pokey) they are obviously doomed to take on board (ho ho) the American Experience. And although all the twins business may sound reminiscent of the pre-OP John Barth, the epic-mocker of The Sot-Weed Factor, in fact it is presented in an unmagical fashion as a tired conundrum, a device for mooring our hero and heroine, against their will, to a past and threatening them with a future.

The more we learn about their family and Company connections the more we realize why they are so anxious to stay at sea or, as Fenn likes to put it, "in medias fucking res"…. A trip through a maze of supercoded disinformation only serves to establish that in the world scripted by the Company no "story" is ever happily resolved, or even resolved at all. To survive imaginatively, creatively, it is necessary to refuse their rotten intrigues: "Reality is wonderful … Dreadful … What it is. But realism is a fucking bore." Thus Fenn will accept his cardiac "episode" as a foretaste of death, but not, for now, part of his story. And Susan will abort the child she has conceived on their cruise because the fiction she and Fenn exist in and on is too marginal to support three-D offspring….

So Fenn becomes a Writer, Susan his Muse/Reader. This way they will cheat time for a while longer—"There will be sex and supper, storms and sleep; with luck there will be some years of loving work and play—and then the end, the end unspeakable." Voluntary sterility, stories about stories about, is it: "The doing and the telling, our writing and our loving—they're twins. That's our story."

Procreation (look at Plato) is the literal-minded version of the marriage of true minds. When Susan aborts her foetus she fertilizes Fenn, who promptly conjures up in the waters of the bay a bona fide mythical monster to stand in for the children of the flesh. Not, it has to be said, a very convincing monster … but that, we are meant to understand, is hardly the point. For the creative life Barth has in mind is not—he's frank about it—particularly vivid, or inventive, or magical; more a matter of talking about writing and writing about talking, a kind of continuous Creative Writing seminar (Muse and Prof), in which all you do is play with your possibilities.

It is this tone that makes Sabbatical a quintessentially Old Poop product. Prof Susan, who succumbs surely too readily to the suggestion that she's somehow creating Literature by reading it nicely and screwing a would-be writer, is allowed to point out that "stories can abort too. Plenty are stillborn; most die young." But this spooky thought drowns in the narrative sea with barely a plop. So insistent is the propaganda about not rocking the boat that we seem blackmailed into accepting any hint of fictional activity as involving the whole corpus of Literature. Whereas most of the time we are responding to something less grand—vague echoes of earlier Barthian motifs, for example. One is prompted, indeed (if one can contrive to slip out from under the insidious authorial "we") to the thought that his early black comedies (The Floating Opera, The End of the Road) were much more inspiriting and much better written than this post-OP, valetudinarian, chatty stuff. Also, to the realization that the more reverently he talks about the pleasures of the text, the more trivial they seem. Is the Ship of Story really such a fragile vessel? Surely not. It is characteristic of Poopedness to insinuate (cheerfully, in the manner of a good old boy who's faced up to the worst) that tiredness is universal, and that coming clean about it is all there's left to do. Which is not to say that Sabbatical is merely dull or depressing. OPs may be shadows of their former selves, but then their former selves were quite something. Which in its turn is of course one of the most infuriating things about them.