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mannerisms, and an ornate tetrameter sonnet sequence. A hybrid of genres,
it marries Pushkin to the Indian epic tradition, which itselfwas influenced by
the English Romantic poets. The novel's form embodies the tension between
narrative sweeping forward and each stanza's reflexive self-enclosure. Seth's
poem is unabashedly not in the plain style of Shapiro and Steele. More self–
consciously "literary," more shamelessly "contemporary" and "fushionable," it
nonetheless shares with the others a concern with limits.
Such limits are initially set by the lively voice of the narrator, who
censors the excesses of the passion of the lovers John and Elizabeth:
Judged by these artless serfs of Cupid,
Love is not blind but, rather, dumb.
Their babblings daily grow more stupid.
I am embarrassed for them...
By clddressing the reader directly here, and in subsequent lines bringing
"this text" into the poem, Seth constantly draws attention to the artistry of
authorship; he almost never allows the mimetic reality of the story to over–
whelm the artful voice telling it. Yet by combining the feel of the postmodern
(as in !talo Calvino) and of the eighteenth century (Henry Fielding, for ex–
ample), the poem works so well as narrative fiction that the reader almost
forgets he or she is reading sonnets. Dialogue becomes super-realistic; collo–
quial American speech is set into Pushkin's stanzas, as in the quarrel between
the lovers about Liz's resentful, "senescent, enuretic" cat:
.. .J
ohn stops as Liz stares wildly
At his flushed face. She turns to go,
Then, turning back, exclaims, 'You know,
He's always acted pretty mildly
Before you first moved in with me...'
'I see.' 'You don't see.' 'Yes 1 see.'
With sheer inventiveness, Seth plays against the boundaries ofAmeri–
can idiom and poetic diction. In a single stanza, the narrator describes popcorn
in terms of its "crackling fissiparity" ; then the characters eat it speaking echt
California slang:
...Whoa! It's hot
-You're right-but really hits the spot...
Seth even makes his characters into wordsmiths. (None of them are
