With Sabbatical John Barth confirms that he has joined the ranks of the Old Poops. A useful category this, invented by Kurt Vonnegut for purposes of self-description. OPs are writers who once upon a time were prodigally talented, funny and full of bright and savage ideas, but have now "mellowed" into premature anecdotage; cuddly, avuncular, sermonizing old buffers, whose main text is how, once upon a time … etc, since of course OPs are nothing if not self-aware. Self-awareness was one of the tricks that made their writing so exciting in the 1960s, and now it provides them with a kind of narrative afterlife, "on in death like hair and fingernails" as Barth wrote less than ten years ago in Chimera, his last book before the onset of OP-hood. OPs have not become conservative exactly, but they're into conservation; in fact their central preoccupation is survival, simply going on...