Summary
Seaview is a road novel that ends on a golf course. Melinda is dying of cancer and wants to die on Cape Cod, where she was born. Her husband, Allen, a gifted golfer, has gone to a drug dealer named Richard to get Laetrile for her, and in return promised to carry cocaine east for him. Allen reneges. Instead he pays for the long drive from California by hustling golf, winning big bets from strangers on the courses they pass. In Arizona the couple meet Bob White, a Pima Indian who travels on with them toward a relative on the Cape who has a claim on a golf course there called Seaview, laid out on tribal land. All the way across the country Allen knows that Richard is coming after him to kill him.
Everything converges on Seaview. The book ends in a long, strange climax on the links: Indians besieging the course, Richard stalking Allen for revenge, a protest on a nude beach, and Melinda dying through it all.
Olson was a poet before he was a novelist, and it shows. The pace is slow, the images are insistent, and the golf becomes a way of thinking about how a person gets from one place to the next. Kirkus was torn. It called the book "ponderous, unpaced, lurching, implausible" and warned that only patient readers would reach its best passages, while still admiring its "imagistic, visionary hunger" and the golf imagery as "a distinct poetic achievement." This is a book for readers who enjoy strange, ambitious American fiction and do not mind a novel that takes its time. Anyone expecting a thriller from the premise should adjust their expectations.
Historical Context & Significance
Seaview won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1983. New Directions had published it in March 1982. The judges passed over some books that are far better known today: Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh and Other Stories and George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., along with Maureen Howard's Grace Abounding and William S. Wilson's Birthplace.
It was Olson's second work of fiction, after The Life of Jesus (1976). Born in Chicago in 1937, he had made his name as a poet, and he taught at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1975. He went on to publish further novels, among them The Woman Who Escaped From Shame (1986), Dorit in Lesbos (1990) and At Sea (1993). The book fell out of print and was reissued in 2006 by Hawthorne Books in Portland, Oregon, as part of its Rediscovery series, with an introduction by the novelist Robert Coover.
Where to get it
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