Seaview

by Toby Olson, Robert Coover (Introduction)

The action of Toby Olson’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Seaview sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod. Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a golf course there that is laid out on tribal grounds. Throughout the journey, Allen knows he is being stalked by a former friend, Richard, a drug-pusher whom he has crossed and who is now determined to murder him. The tortured lives of Richard and his wife Gerry stand as a dream of what might have become of Allen and Melinda had things been otherwise. The lines that draw these people together converge at Seaview Links, and on the mad battlefield that this golf course becomes, the novel reaches its complex ending. Seaview’s vibrant language and fateful plot make this study of an America on the edge an unforgettable read.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Toby Olson (born 1937 Chicago) is an American novelist.
Through high school and his four years in the Navy as a surgical technician, he lived in California, Arizona, and Texas.
He graduated from Occidental College and Long Island University.
Toby Olson has published eight novels, the most recent of which – The Blond Box – appeared from Fiction Collective-2 in 2003; and numerous books of poetry, including Human Nature (New Directions). A new novel, The Bitter Half, is forthcoming. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olson’s novel Seaview received the PEN/Faulkner award for The Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction in 1983. Toby Olson lives in Philadelphia and in North Truro, on Cape Cod.

Reviews

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man and wife, Allen and Melinda, are traveling across country, from California to Cape Cod. He was a former teacher and is an avid, skilled golfer. She is the more talented and intelligent of the two, a former writer and painter. She is currently is the late stages of cancer and wants to go back to the Cape, where she grew up, to die. In visiting a friend, Richard, before leaving to obtain a cancer drug for Melinda, Allen agrees to transport some cocaine to Tombstone, AZ and Kansas City. In Arizona they meet an American Indian, Bob White, who also wants to travel to the Cape, which is the original home of his tribe. The trip comes to a culmination at Seaview, a golf course on the Cape.

This novel has its strengths. Much of the writing is fantastic. There are several scenes where Olson’s writing is unlike anything I remember reading. There is a description of The Chair, who is the chairman of the Seaview golf course, getting dressed for a golf tournament. The detail is phenomenal and yet completely absorbing. There is an episode where one of the golfers is rooting around in a large pocket on his golf bag, pulling out a menage of items as he looks for something specific. Again, the detail is mesmerizing. The characters are likewise complex and rich in detail, making them interesting even if you don’t like one of them. Allen and Melinda have a strong physical and emotional relationship, and yet Melinda finds them unable to verbally communicate what they are feeling in a satisfactory manner.

What I struggled with was the amount of coincidence in the plot. So much of what happened was just too easy and didn’t seem reasonable. There was also a big scene towards the end that just seemed unrealistic and to not fit well with the rest of the story. Finally, golf, both the physical and mental aspects of the game, plays a big part in the story. I don’t golf but I enjoy reading occasionally about competitive sports, and I can say that I very much enjoyed these parts of the story. I could see, however, someone that does not like golf just scanning over these parts of the novel, and in that case I would recommend they just not read the book.

This was my first by Toby Olson and was a Pen Faulkner winner. Toby Olson has written and published a lot of poetry and I think that shows in his writing. For me, what started out as an outstanding reading experience ended up being a mixed bag, but I liked enough of what I read that I will probably try something else.

[Kenneth P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 1983 recipient of the Pen/Faulkner award. Without question it is a rich, ambitious novel that chronicles a coast to coast journey from LA to Cape Cod. There is Allen, a golf hustler and cocaine mule. There is his wife Melinda, a Cape Cod native who is dying of cancer and needs to get back home in order to die. There is Bob White, a Native American from Jerome, Arizona whom Allen and Melinda befriend along the way. Bob White is a displaced Pamet Wampanoag which makes him, without doubt, a Cape Cod Indian. He too needs to get home. And there is of course, the gun.

Hence the west to east journey that includes real cowboys and real Indians. The drug/crime angle brings tension. In Tombstone, Arizona there is gunplay. As Allen hustles rich golfers on the greens, Bob White bags fat rattlers in the rocks of the desert. There is a lovely repast for the three of them with salad, grilled snake and champagne on a motel patio.

We watch Melinda dwindle. We never really see her pain because she is so adept at hiding it. She is dying quietly. She is the balls of the book.

In the journey across America there is a pause at the Great Divide, Independence Pass, 12,000 feet, where Allen and his dying Melinda have a serious moment of understanding. In the Midwest, adjacent to an old motel, the three principals play a run-down miniature golf course that features an ocean theme. Whales, sea-horses, and sharks abound (yes, they were reading Moby Dick aloud in the car). There is a mini-golf dolphin-prop that is home to a big king-snake who emerges with a little bird in it's jaws. Golf-- birdie. Certainly the book is overly symbolic. There are countless snake references including a human snake who follows the trio and is bent on drug-justice.

Finally they arrive at the Cape, the real Cape up along the spectacular dunes near Provincetown. No real towns or locations are mentioned but clearly that's the place. It's the National Seashore with an old rundown golf course that is home to a diverse local community that incudes real estate dudes, Portuguese fishermen, Air Force guys from the local radar station and, of course, Cape Cod Indians. There are moonlight parties with tubs of shellfish and cases of beer. There is dancing on the putting green.

The ending is wild, zany, apocalyptic.

If you have no understanding or appreciation for the game of golf you may have trouble with this book. There are long descriptive passages that feature skills, strategies and nuances of the game.

Do you know of the Eastern quail known as the Bobwhite? It goes, "too-tweet?... Bob-white?" Yeah, for me that's the Cape, those baby quail all in a row, scurrying to keep up with Mama as she rushes into the bushes and trees. I'm not a Cape Codder because I was born on the wrong side of the bridge. But I lived there for 30 years.

There is a touching epilogue in which Bob White speaks of his childhood in Arizona, working for pennies as a pin-setter in a bowling alley long before they had pin-setting machines. When he learns that caddying paid more, he shows up at the golf course. Disillusioned, he does not finish his first round. He just drops the clubs and disappears into the trees.

It struck me then that this was no thing for a man to be doing with his time...... I heard the voice of that quail in the brush beyond where I was headed. He was singing the two notes I took from him and am now known by.

That is the story of my brief career as a caddie for lost men and how I got my real and public name.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

He bought her a pair of warm socks. She read many books. She seemed to be waiting for something other than her death. He took her to a baseball game in a small town in southern Arizona. They did not travel much on the super highways, and he drove slowly. He liked the way she dressed herself with such care. He bought a gun. He liked the smell of the medicine bag. She bought herself a thimble after she had pierced her finger with a needle and it would not heal. He bought himself bright-yellow cheap headcovers for show. She had some trouble when she swallowed. He liked the way she was lighter each time he lifted her up. He bought her a stuffed stocking with the smile of a fat snake sewn into it for the small of her back. He told her stories of adventure and other details about golf. He told her stories about his childhood. She told him about the way sand drifted along the Cape. He bought her a music box the size of a matchbook. She liked the seriousness in his eyes when he was studying. He read very little, but he went over books in his mind. She bought him range balls at a market. She was pleased that he liked it that she was finally reading Moby-Dick. He liked the way she understood the behavior of other people. She liked the way he sweated when he made love to her. She was no longer curious about his secrets. He felt she had no secrets.

She thought of his psychological insides as a series of mystery boxes, some transparent, others only half opened, the rest opaque and totally closed, shut off from his entrance completely. He was strong on the complexity of details. He rolled his eyes and laughed with her when she told him about his boxes. She liked the ways in which she had become physical with the cancer. He bought her books about the Indians of the Southwest. They both stopped taking each other so much for granted. She bought him a Coltrane tape, Meditations. He took her to see a pottery exhibition and found he was moved by it. He liked the way she liked to bathe in the dark. She thought seldom about the other possible men, lost days, and her lovers (so many years ago) back East; it's all right, good-bye and no regrets. They walked short distances some evenings, but like young lovers or old people. She appreciated his sadness when he was sad; she left him alone with it, realizing it was proper and necessary. He was taken by the hardness of copper jewelry against her vulnerable skin. She liked the way, in her memory, he put a small red boat out from a dock. They talked about the congruence of their traveling dreams.

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to say, this was a fairly strange book. It was about a couple, Allen who is a golf hustler and Melinda, traveling across country from California to Cape Cod. Melinda is dying of cancer and wants to die where she came from. They pick up a man named Bob White along the way who travels with them. There is also a couple named Richard and Gerry who are following with the intention of killing Allen. There is a lot of descriptive prose of their travels but Olson saved his most descriptive prose for the golfing parts that went into extensive meticulous detail. He also went into the same meticulous descriptive prose when describing a man called the Chair dressing to go golfing. There were parts in the book that were very confusing and difficult to understand exactly what was going on and to top it off the ending was weird. This was a Pen/Faulkner Award winner but not something I particularly enjoyed.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The precision of Olson's descriptions and details are incredible, and reminded me of Don DeLillo. The minutest motions of a single stroke in a game of golf can go on for sentences, which might sound boring but somehow generates a remarkable degree of tension and momentum. In fact, it's the passages that don't describe something concrete when the writing becomes a bit dull -- long, abstract catalogues of what characters think or feel are rendered from such a distance that there is no emotion in the emotions, so nothing seems at stake. Especially when the novel as a whole puts so much at stake personally, historically, physically, politically, and otherwise. The story begs, on one hand, to be read symbolically as it brings together the subtle violences of golf and real estate development with the brutality of colonizing of the United States. But what again reminded me of DeLillo was how well Olson keeps the novel from being pure symbol -- the concreteness and precision of those descriptions kept any metaphorical speculations grounded in a tangible world, making them all the more complex and provocative.

[Myles · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.2/5.0) This is a very eighties novel-- women smoking in bathtubs, cellophane baggies of cocaine, Native Americans hunting rattlesnakes in the desert. Seaview is best read listening to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAOxCq....

Olson writes with a crystaline prose that's just remarkable. I bought the book years ago because I found the cover strikingly beautiful. Seaview's contents are just an added bonus, one that I really can't recommend enough.

Last year, when publishers were trying to sell The Art of Fielding, the pitch was that you could enjoy the book even if you hated baseball; at least for me, that ended up being untrue. With Seaview, a novel so preoccupied with golf, I expected yet another dismal march through sports fiction. But I was wrong. Though golf permeates-- scenes on the putting green taking up twenty-five pages at a time-- Olson makes the experience exhilarating. His powers of description are strongest when his subjects are at their most banal. A page dedicated to the patterns on a pair of golf slacks, another to tea vapors in a cancer patient's lungs. I will read more Toby Olson, even as everyone else seems determined to leave him buried.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The writing style is excellent, but the story itself loses steam near the end and could have been so much more. The first third of "Seaview" is mostly dull. However, there are brilliant nuggets of prose to be found if the reader trudges on.

[Yancy Craft · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange and often boring book, though you might enjoy the really boring long parts if you love golf. There was an oddity of absurdity mixed in with late Beat feeling that made me want to rate it higher, except it wasnt coherent in its paracoherence. An interesting oddness, but not very interesting.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is there a Goodreads list of best golf literature? If so, surely this would be on it. I really enjoyed the early 1980s vibe of this book. At times it read like a dark version of the movie Caddieshack.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful. Nothing. I mean nothing....ever......happens.