Synopses & Reviews
Hailed by the New York Times as "the best writer of fiction in America," John Barth now gives us as high-humored, unorthodox, touching and delightful a tale as he has ever told.
Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe and her husband, Fenwick Scott Key Turner, a 50-year-old
ex-CIA officer currently between careers ardent sailor and husband, lineal descendant of the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Fenwick is now an aspiring novelist who hates spy novels as much as he loves his wife of seven years, his Black-eyed Susan. What he really wants to tell is their story: a story that they have lived, in part, aboard their cruising sailboat Pokey, Wye I., having completed a nine-month voyage from Chesapeake Bay to the Caribbean and
back. It is a story that involves, among other mysteries, sinister Key Island, uncharted, smack in the middle of the busy Chesapeake; the unsolved disappearance into that same Bay of Fenn's twin brother, Manfred, a.k.a. the Prince of Darkness; a fabled sea monster in realistic tidewater Maryland; the greater Seckler family in "the salty, boozy Fells Point
neighborhood of Baltimore"; the vexing possibility that our children may actually be our grandchildren; the painful question whether to have any children at this hour of the world; and darkest mystery of all, but the key to all such mysteries love.
The key to their story is their story.
With a little help from John Barth, Susan and Fenwick write Sabbatical: A Romance a tale which is marvelously and quintessentially Barthian.
About the Author
John Barth won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973 for Chimera, a volume of novellas. The author of five novels (Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor, The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and Letters), he is the Alumni Centennial Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.