Bay of Arrows
By Jay Parini
Holt, 383 pages, $22.50
How do you screw up paradise? This is the question the poet/novelist (in that order) Jay Parini must have been asking himself in this semi-millennial year of Columbus` discovery of the New World. His answer, that it`s amazingly easy, is convincingly rendered despite all the odds arrayed against it:
First, this is a (groan) mid-life crisis novel about a modern poet/
academic named Christopher Genovese who teaches in a college called Barrington (Bennington?) in Vermont and gets in trouble over an affair with a sexy student whose thesis he is supervising.
Second, this is yet another of those novels, invented by John Fowles in 1970 with ”The French Lieutenant`s Woman” but made all the rage by A.S. Byatt`s ”Possession” a few years ago, in which a story of the past and one of the present are told in alternate sections and seen to coalesce as the book moves toward its end.
Geno, as Genovese is called by his patronizing colleagues, is obsessed with Columbus and trying to write a long poem about him. But even in Geno`s own view his subject seems little more than a ”genocidal (pun probably intended) maniac,” making him hard to animate but even harder to release as a subject.
Despite Parini`s 1990 coup of period re-creation in ”The Last Station,” about Tolstoy`s last days, in this book the first-chapter dream by Geno of Columbus` landing in Hispaniola during his First Voyage seems peremptory and cartoonish, betraying a poet`s impatience with the atmospheric details that would establish the pastness of the past. But within a few brisk alternating chapters both Parini and Geno meet all our reasonable readerly demands by creating a complete world ex nihilo-with a few brilliant phrases and total immersion in the minds of characters living and dead.
Columbus` world can be seen as existing either independently or as part of the mental weather of Geno`s and is convincing either way, as Parini makes us feel Geno`s crisis, hackneyed as it may seem in summary, by taking us convincingly inside a writer`s head:
”As a writer, (Geno) felt the hideous pressure of unwritten work building up inside him. Images, fragments of language, voices. . . . What he needed now was time.”
Which is exactly what the college refuses him when he asks for a sabbatical to return to the Dominican Republic, where the Columbus seed was planted, because, as his department chairman says (around the time we see Columbus himself being politely refused funding for his enterprise by the Portuguese court), ”what the college understands-and is willing to support-is scholarship. You see, Geno, it`s almost impossible to judge the quality of a poem or fictional sketch. (This from a professional critic!) Criticism, on the other hand, is something one can judge.” Geno has exactly the opposite problem in his relations with his student, ”the lovely and corruptible Lizzy Nash,” who talked to him for hours about sex and whose senior thesis idea (on Woolf`s ”To the Lighthouse”) seems altogether loony to Geno but becomes more plausible each minute he spends in her intoxicating company.
Geno, also of course, has two young sons and a beautiful, sexy wife, Susan, who is herself a writer and adores him, even though they`ve become a little distant, a little bored with each other. In other words, Geno has everything but isn`t happy with it, just as Columbus has everything, including a rich and sexy wife, but lacks the means to pursue a vision most of his friends think crazy even if he`s right.
Parini doesn`t push the parallel too hard; in fact, he succeeds by semi-parodying the idea of any congruence between the Admiral of the Ocean Seas and a beached academic poet of the 20th Century, making it the more likely by insisting on the quotidian tedium in the life of each. Glory exists only through the haze of distance, either of the past and future, as Geno gradually realizes and we with him.
Geno`s paradise is lost when Lizzy brings him up on a sexual harassment charge before the college Human Relations Committee-and then regained, or rather replaced, when out of the blue comes a check for $542,000, a ”genius” grant from the MacAlastair Foundation; and the Genoveses are off to Samana province of Dominica, specifically to the Bay of Arrows, where the Tainos first greeted the newly funded Admiral of the Ocean Seas with a rain of archery.
With the help of a local realtor who locates them in a village unofficially named Los Angeles and who turns out to be a Dodger fan and aided by the natural gentle hospitality of the local people Columbus abused five centuries before, Chez Genovese takes shape from the ground up with Edenic simplicity, and the Columbus poem, which we have fragmentarily seen through the novel, proceeds.
It is at this point that the reader had best discover for himself how Parini succeeds in bringing together the Hispanic and single-minded cruelty of the Columbus voyages with the continuing dissatisfaction and self-destructive idealism of a newly liberated poet and makes each convincing in the other`s terms.
Parini, as ”The Last Station” demonstrated, is very good at showing how an artist or visionary can be at once idealistic, mundane and incompetently avaricious. (Geno is the only person in the U.S. to have lost money in real estate during the 1980s, and he dreams of acquiring penny stocks in Andes gold mines as Columbus lusts after gold in the Indies.)
Columbus comes to a just and funny end in the prose narrative, and a more celestial one in the poetic ”Masque: Columbus at the Gates of Heaven” that ends the book with a debate in verse among God, Noam Chomsky, Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus and assorted others, where he is assigned by God a fate fit for us all:
”I shall let you try it all again,/ my Christo-ferens. Go back home./. . . . (I hope,/ as always, for a kindly soul to catch/ the fire of its redemption, to give up the search/ for Something Better, to relinquish all.)/ Begin with nothing and with nothing end.”
