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Seaward. - book reviews
National Review, August 23, 1993 by Christopher Caldwell
In an age when to describe a novel as solipsistic and formless is less to condemn than to taxonomize it - as contemporary and, alas, American - Brad Leithauser has been the kind of modern fiction writer that even skeptics go out of their way to read. In Leithauser's new novel, however, something has gone suddenly wrong.
All the deftness has disappeared, and instead of charming eccentrics in exotic places, we have a cast of dullards unmatched outside of those French nouveaux romans in which the main characters are the drapes and furniture. Terry Seward is a communications lawyer and a blue-chip mediocrity. His wife, Betsy, has drowned off the Cayman Islands two years earlier. If the jacket copy is to be believed, Leithauser is trying to make his characters boring, to get across the point that extraordinary things happen to very ordinary people. The "extraordinary thing" comes when Terry, waiting for his sister-in-law in a deserted summer house in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp, sees an apparition of his dead wife. It unhinges him. He takes two months off work, begins to research psychic phenomena, and embraces a number of New Age platitudes. To be sure, boring people can come to the kinds of revelations that are worth writing novels over - but not when they show a stunted moral imagination and a puniness of soul that arise from the author's own failings. The problems start with tineared dialogue. And there's the unizative voice. Terry doesn't eat lobsters; he executes the whole elaborate business of crustaceal deconstruction and extraction." Every meal is an orgy of periphrasis, as Leithauser describes everything ad nauseam - including nausea. This kind of writing isn't just annoying; it's a distraction from the potentially interesting question of what one is to make of Betsy's apparition.
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