The Tidewater Tales: A NOVEL by John Barth (Putnam’s: $24.95; 624 pp.)

John Barth’s eighth novel, “The Tidewater Tales: A Novel,” picks up where his seventh novel, “Sabbatical,” left off. In that novel, Fenwick Scott Key Turner and Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, seven years married, are returning to Chesapeake Bay from an 8 1/2-month cruise to Yucatan and the West Indies. The novel is made up of stories they tell and the arguments they have over the proper way of telling these stories as they sail for two weeks among the islands in Chesapeake Bay.

In “The Tidewater Tales,” the two main characters are named Peter and Katherine Sherritt Sagamore--the latter 8 1/2 months pregnant--who spend the last two weeks of her term cruising Chesapeake Bay in their sailboat “Story,” telling stories to--and being told stories by--the people they meet.

Their major preoccupations involve the sea, sex and stories, and the tales we hear are mostly about seamen and semen, navigation and narration, textuality and sexuality. Matters nautical and narrative become entwined, giving Barth’s narrators the chance to retell the stories of Odysseus, Don Quixote, Scheherazade, Huck Finn and many more. This aspect of the novel is dominated by Barth’s interest in narrative theory and literary criticism, which is the base from which he has long been writing his novels. Barth is an expert at reading not only the lines of our major classical texts but of reading the “spaces” as well, by which I mean the stories in these stories that never get told, or the stories that have the potentiality for being retold or told differently. What he does with the Odysseus story here is truly wondrous.

Given the nature of such pure literariness, we have narrative worlds within worlds in “The Tidewater Tales”: Chesapeake Bay supplies the modern equivalent of the Aegean Sea, holds also Cervantes’ Cave of Montesinos, is subject to “Tempest” tempests and contains modern swimmers who find their equivalent in a three-act drama involving the story of sperm and ovum swimming toward fertilization. This is a world of doubling: Peter and Katherine meet Theodoros and Diana Dmetrikakis, who give us a radically revised version of the Odysseus story; meet a modern Don Quixote who finds a modern Lady Belerma and her daughter; and meet also Fenwick Turner and Susan Seckler, who (renamed) come sailing into the action from “Sabbatical.”

All the major characters are doubles who in turn double themselves in a novel about doubling, ending with Katherine giving birth to (you guessed it!) twins. (Barth, who has a twin sister, once wrote: “We literal twins . . . are each of us the fallen moiety of a once-seamless whole . . . and our habit of wholeness ought to make us ideal partners, especially for another twin . . . particularly if our original half falls by the way.”)

“The Tidewater Tales” is 624 pages, 364,000 words by my calculation, 1.8 miles long from start to finish. In a novel almost two miles long, Barth’s literary self-consciousness is sometimes too much. Less would have been More. The novel becomes a giant literary game, the emphasis upon intertextuality or the relationship of one story to another. The idea of reality simply becomes another form of representation; fictionality is totalized as we imagine ourselves into being and become the fictions that we imagine.

The narrative functions on two levels--a foreground and a background--the former made up of the people Peter and Kate meet on their sea journey, the latter the classical stories their lives replicate. Since this narrative is replete with Adam and Eve, it must include evil, which is embodied by the workings of the CIA and KGB. Here what is “real” is equally problematic, especially when we encounter double and triple agents, in a world where the capacity for fictionalizing is as inexhaustible as that of Barth’s narrators, albeit less redemptive because we are being told the wrong kind of stories. (Much of the action here, as in “Sabbatical,” is based on newspaper accounts of the J. A. Paisley and Philip Agee stories.)

Another element of narrative evil is supplied by Willy Sherritt (Kate’s brother) and Porter “Poonie” Baldwin Jr. (her former husband). Willy and Poonie--like the WESCAC computer in “Giles Goat-Boy” and the rapists in “Sabbatical”--embody the Doomsday aspect of modern life and technology: Their mentality is inseparable from the whole urban, industrial, bureaucratic process run amok. They are literally rapists and defilers, and what they warp sexually finds its equivalent in their willingness to make a buck by dumping toxic waste into Chesapeake Bay.

The CIA-toxic-waste aspect of Barth’s plot has a very different quality from the story about stories. It is less literary, less absorbed into the novel and seems to set the limits to what Barth’s imagination is able to accommodate. Even as a form of representation, this element of plot is more lumpish, more intractable, less absorbed by the fictionality upon which this novel so self-consciously insists. The story of Willy and Poonie never gets much beyond cliche, and they meet a most melodramatic end at the novel’s close when their helicopter is blown out of the sky in a storm. Whatever literary suggestion may underpin this ending, nature seems to cleanse itself--which seems at variance with the idea that art (that is, fiction) supposedly holds this function.

Barth has now written the same novel twice, and many of his earlier novels and stories anticipated, worked, and reworked much of this material. This raises the question of where Barth goes from here. There is no one writing today who has the resources of his imagination or the depth of understanding about the nature of narrative. His novels are too complex to become predictable, too full of surprises not to interest. But how many times can he rewrite the same story, recast the same tale? Barth can always write the theory of narrative that he has, in effect, been writing in his fiction. He could also turn more seriously to the Willy-Poonie plot of his stories--that is, to the way that evil comes into being and how we best cope with it. Here he would be changing narrative modes, moving from Homer, Cervantes and Twain to Melville, Dostoevski and Conrad and such postmodern equivalents as Nabokov and Pynchon. In the Willy-Poonie plot, a sense of fictionality meets head on with a sense of reality, which, in “The Tidewater Tales,” is confronted by the storm rather than Barth. Such “reality”--no matter how defined--is too complex, too much with us today, to be blown away so easily.