SEAVIEW

Though certainly a failure—ponderous, unpaced, lurching, implausible—poet Olson's second work of fiction (The Life of Jesus was his first) nonetheless has about it an imagistic, visionary hunger that's striking, that sets it apart. A young woman, Melinda, is dying of cancer; her husband Allen, to obtain Laetrile for her, has recourse to a drug-dealer named Richard, who extracts in return Allen's promise to deliver cocaine on his trek from California to Cape Cod, where Melinda was born and now wishes to die. But Allen opts out of the courier-job; instead, to finance the trip, he works the golf courses they pass as a hustler, winning large bets through the skill of his game. In Arizona, he and Melinda meet up with an Indian named Bob White, who then accompanies them east, talking of a Cape Cod golf course run by a relative. This course, Seaview, is built on Indian tribal land—and it's here that the book concludes on a note of apocalypse: Indians staging a siege of the course, Richard stalking Allen in revenge for being burned, a nude-beach protest, Melinda meanwhile dying. True, such ungainliness—if speeded up—would deliver comedy. But Olson slows it down instead. And though certain scenes are just awful—Allen and Melinda making love while the Laetrile drips intravenously into her arm, a symbol-laced game of miniature golf, the climax—a few are spookily clear and magical: Bob White's explanation of what immortality actually involves; and the explanation of golf as a model for the invisibly drawn lines of everyday human effort. ("You had to do something here that locked most everything else out of here so that you could get to something over there, and when you got over there you had to do the same thing over again.") Indeed, this golf imagery—despite the pawky golf scenes themselves—is a distinct poetic achievement. Unfortunately, however, the disastrous overload of the rest—with Olson attempting to put Indians, cancer, golf, and drugs in one lumpy narrative package—means that only intrepid, boredom-tolerant readers will come upon the genuinely fine moments here.