John Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides
to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm
forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out
his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a
quest through the murkier regions of his own memory--a semi-memoir,
staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love,
marriage, selves, and counterselves.