Conceits

By Paul Gray

SABBATICAL. A ROMANCE

by John Bank

Putnam: 366 pages; $14.95

A teacher named Susan Rachel Allan Seckler Turner is planning a scholarly study of "Twins, Doubles and Schizophrenia in the American Literary Imagination.'" She is a twin. So is her husband, Fenwick Scott Key Turner. And so is their creator, Author John Earth, whose fiction (including this novel) fits admirably into Susan's thesis. Could it be that characters create their authors and art generates life? What if everyone is really living in someone else's dream?

Such shopworn conceits abound in Sabbatical, plus stories within stories, objets trouves (newspaper clippings) and many, many footnotes. In other words, Earth is up to a lot of his old tricks. His performance this time begins with the end of a nine-month Caribbean sea journey by Susan and Fenwick. They have steered their cruising sailboat back to its starting point in Chesapeake Bay. thus describing "the closing of the circle." Now what? They have failed to make certain decisions while at sea. Should Susan have a baby or accept a tenured position at Swarthmore? Fenwick has a similar problem. A former employee of the CIA, he has published a book exposing some of the agency's skulduggeries. Now he must choose between capitalizing on his notoriety via the lecture circuit or accepting an adjunct professorship at the University of Delaware. As if these problems were not taxing enough, they are jointly writing a novel. They are in fact writing this novel.

The task makes them a trifle selfabsorbed. "The world is a seamless web," Susan declares at one point, which means that telling the story of how they met forces them to start all the way back at the Big Bang. A corollary of this notion troubles Susan: "We don't believe that Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency for the sake of this story, do we?" Fenwick does not answer.

As the cosmos revolves around them, other characters occasionally appear in person or memory. There is Fenwick's twin brother Manfred, a more sinister CIA agent, recently drowned under suspicious circumstances. Manfred's son (by Susan's mother) is either in a Chilean prison or dead. Susan's twin sister Miriam pops up when the story needs her; she is still scarred from being raped by a motorcycle gang and tortured by the Shah's secret police in Iran. She and her current lover, a Vietnamese refugee, have an infant son named Edgar Allan Ho.

A long, terrible war is reduced to a lame pun; death, rape and torture become narrative incidents, useful for advancing the plot. Meanwhile, Susan and Fenwick congratulate themselves on how well they are living and writing their novel. "My hat is off to us," Susan says. "Well done, us." She leads cheers for her husband's sensitivity: "That's some intuition you had there on that rampart." Fenwick returns the compliment: "What a teacher you are, Suse. No wonder your students fall in love with you."

The possibility that these people are monomaniacal monsters is never raised. Readers steeped in Earth's work--five earlier novels, including The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), and two collections of shorter fiction--may be able to deny or evade this issue. Art is pattern and design, after all, not morality. Or, on another front: a writer must use material, however unpleasant, not weep over or try to correct it. Fine. But those who feel claustrophobic in the presence of smug, self-deluded solipsism may also decide to skip the whole experience. Barth has often been a pleasant guide through the states of his mind; Susan and Fenwick, his alter egos, are not.

--By Paul Gray

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