624
PARTISAN REVIEW
ation through its relation to memory and experience. That rel–
ation can be sinuous, as trope glides into memory or vice versa.
For example, Sears is distressed when a lover leaves him, and his
feeling of bleakness is conveyed through a metaphoric travel–
ogue. "Now there are, it seemed
to
Sears, some Balkans of the
spirit, where the villages are lit by fire and the bears weigh up–
wards of seven hundred pounds, and to which he now found him–
self quite helplessly being transported ... " Wonderfully drab de–
tails follow. But when, a few pages on, we read a flashback of
Sears's encounter with a blind Balkan prophetess, this "Balkan of
the spirit" retroactively becomes more than an extended figure of
speech. Sears's sojourn there, if figurative, is no less "real" than
his visit to blind Gallia, his abortive fishing trip with Eduardo
the elevator man, or his meeting Renee in line at the bank.
At moments, Sears vanishes altogether.
It
may be with some
discomfort that we come upon the fantasy of lying near a stream
gunning for intruders, abruptly introduced at the beginning of a
chapter. "What I can see of the sky is blue. The smell of mint is
very strong and I hear the music of water." Just who is this HI"? But
by the end of this watery tale, the separate streams of Sears, the
narrator, and perhaps of the late John Cheever too, have merged
with a grace that transcends narrative logic.
What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our
knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of
their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to
come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on
the planet. .. of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is
the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of
an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and
renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!
This composite voice-a little chorus-is the truest voice of
Oh What a Paradise
It
Seems.
The tone is awe at the beauty of a
pond, a life, a world precariously salvaged from destruction. The
theme is germane-and a fitting way to end a work that ends a
life's work. Still, this book remains a curious, not altogether
com–
fortable blend of foreground headline and background hymn.
It
may well be too Wordsworthian for fans of the Wapshots, and too
suburban for lovers of nature lyric.
