Barth time
Barbara Trapido
The nicest thing about John Barth's Sabbatical is the personality of its two heroes, Fenn and Susan, who sparkle from its pages, bringing their informed wit to bear upon the ironies of contemporary American life from the CIA to the all-beef salami. Their domestic life together on their boat, the Pokey — the pink grapefruit and warm beer, the brave attempts to rescue bald Fenn's overboard hat, the wittily lov- ing connubial exchanges — give the book an emotional depth and optimism which is at once sensual and engaging. This is a significant achievement, given that Fenn and Susan are burdened, in this fictional ex' periment, with being at the same time the novel's subjects and its creators. This is a novel about the novel; a spirited investiga' tion into the mechanics of its own creation. For this reason Fenn and Susan sometimes talk like graduate school alpha Pe°Ple, discussing their own lives in terms 01 Melville and Boccaccio, or use prose like this: 'What are our options? I mean view' pointwise for our story. Run them by me would you, hon?' Again, in many ways they exist to embody ideas. They are botn twins because 'our being twins ought to give us some kind of authorial edge over e. . . . Dumas . . . R. L. Stevenson . . . Mar' Twain . . .and other such fanciers of twinsi doubles and Doppelgangers as images ° the divided or narcissistic self.' TheY are descended from the author of the Star Spangled Banner and Edgar Allan P°e respectively so that they may unite diverse threads in the American literary tradition. They make love in a rain storm because, as Susan teaches in her creative writing class' the main uses of weather in literature are t° contrast or reinforce mood, to cause shil?c "" wrecks and to drive lovers into roman°, shelter. All this said, they are nonetheless pleasure to befriend through 360 pages.
Fenwick Scott Key Turner, ex.-acadenne'
ex-CIA, post heart-attack, is living partly Off royalties from his Agee style exposure
Which has never quite made showbiz level on account of the rightward turn of recent American politics. His wife Susan is a teacher of literature and creative writing at an elite college. Fenwick, who threw his first manuscript into an Andalusian gorge,
Is now, his wife believes, about to 'hit the ground running' with a late but first rate novel. The novel is 'OUR STORY'. Sab- batical is full of silent screen joke headings. Here is another: `SUSAN WANTS A DYNAMITE CLANDESTINE ADULTEROUS PAS- SIONATE AFFAIR' (`Yeah' says Susan, addressing here own sub-title, `gimme one of those.') And we have the PLESHBECK', spelling derived from Susan's memories of childhood visits to the Cinema with her foreign Jewish father. (`Comes now the fleshbeck Susele.') We even have the odd 'fleshforverts,' though Fenn doesn't approve of this as a literary device. Susan's mother Carmen, who dresses Bizet style and whose ethnic foibles grace some of the pages of this novel, goes in for the 'fleshforverts' in dreams. She sees the deaths of Manfred and Gus who vanish- ed on CIA business in Pinochet's Chile. They step into the dream like 'people on a V talk show', Susan reports. Manfred is barmen's common law husband and Fenn's twin brother. Gus is their son, the only Marxist plumber in Fells Point'. The book is as conscientiously and delicately tinted With incest innuendo as with other tradi- tional literary devices: sea monsters, 111Ysterious islands and strange coin- cidences. As a novel about the novel, it treats us to some enjoyable literary side- swipes — the Nobel Prize, for example, which is awarded 'like Swedish foreign aid' to foreign authors who lose 'all but their ltroners' in translation. Ezra Pound is grafi- Ihngly shown up as a person who dismissed of eastern culture as 'two gross of broken statues'. The narrative sequences in the book are beautifully done. Fenn's ac- ,.count of his life in Andalusia with first wife Marilyn, who is 'handsome in a plucked eyebrow kind of way'; Susan's story of her sister Miriam's gang rape; the delicious ignant comedy of the sister's reunion on the Pokey, where freaked-out Miriam licences her children (called Messiah and she Allan Ho) to wreck the boat while 8fle lectures Susan on the evils of teaching elite college kids.
And the darker undercurrents of the hovel — Miriam's descent into madness, the sinister Key Island, the menace implied 1 the broken beer bottle and the used con- dom which conservation-minded Susan buries in sand with her foot, the disap- pearance of Fenn's brother and nephew powerful too. There were times when I longed to have this witty, politically astute teirriance less introspectively turned in on its °Wn telling — less treatise and more novel but it does expose a creative flair which !tiakes it something of a dynamite affair in Its own right.
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