470
PARTISAN REVIEW
Barth has, from the start, tended toward that assimilative,
encyclopedic mode.
End of the Road
seems to be a dispassionate
waltz of ideas. Yet it would be a strange reader who was not
deeply involved and deeply moved by its human drama. More
than a few times, Barth has taken his fictions to the farther edge
of reflexivism, creating stories about themselves, about language,
about telling stories. Yet there always remains a classic core of
"about-ness": along with the country of the mind, the geogra–
phy of the Eastern shore; along with a concern for the terminality
of fictional forms, a concern for the relations of men and women;
in short, an involvement with the world of culture and experience
beyond the black marks on the white page.
" 'You and I agree,''' says Fenwick, Barth's protagonist,
"'that a story with nothing fantastic in it lacks something essen–
tial. But how can we stick the fantastic into the middle of Chesa–
peake Bay in the May and June of 1980?'" Fenwick and his wife
of seven years, Susan, turn over the question of the fantastic. Is a
CIA plot to assassinate a troublesome agent in the Chesapeake
Bay fantastic? Is it fantastic .if the eliminating is done by the
KGB? Is a sea monster fantastic? "'It won't work,''' says Susan.
"'You can have fabulous sea monsters, or sperms and eggs that
talk; you can have Fenwick and Susan. But you can't mix the two
together. The four.'" "'Scheherazade would,'" replies Fenwick.
"'Shakespeare would. We can do anything that we can do, Suse.
And what we can't do as Fenn and Susan, we can do as Author.'''
And so
Sabbatical
seeks to be all novels, less parodic and
I
udic than most of Barth bu t more mellow and tender than any–
thing he has written, reflexive, at moments funny and inventive,
at other moments documentary, almost dogged, invaded by the
eeriness of public events. It is, at moments, a spy story with a
character at the center who hales spy stories.
It
is, at moments, a
realistic novel by an author who is on record as finding the real–
istic novel irrelevant. And it is a love story by an author who dis–
covers, as he goes on, that sustaining the continuity of that love
story is, well, boring.
Briefly, it is the story of Fenwick and Susan, on a Chesapeake
Bay cruise, very much in love. Along the way occurs the mutual
question of how they will write this book. Also along the way is
the question of CIA executive John Arthur Paisley, mysteriously
murdered, apparently, on his boat in Chesapeake Bay, in the real
