Coast to Coast

March 29, 1999
"It's not a tragedy. It's not quite a comedy. My agent would not be surprised to discover that we're having difficulty placing it." It's also how late-middle-aged sit-com writer Barnaby Pierce describes his fraught marriage, and the way that the prolific British writer Raphael vicariously names the hybrid genre of his own serio-comic antiromance. Told mainly through the snapping, sparring dialogue between Barnaby and his wife, Marion, as they travel from New York to California in a '67 Jag, the novel maps the course of their life together. In crisis, the two reveal and revenge each other's infidelities, discussing divorce even as they make their way cross-country to attend their son's wedding in the vehicle they plan to give him as a nuptial gift. In jest, the couple is verbally dexterous and almost flirtatious, la Beatrice and Benedict; in anger, each is ruthlessly ad hominem. Barnie scorns Marion's desire for separation--yet there is real pathos in his provocative insistence that she doesn't love him anymore--as he struggles to find ways of keeping her in his life. Jealousies run deep: Marion slept with Barnie's best friend, Hal, with whom they stay on their way west; Barnie had an affair with a woman close to Marion. And of their four children, one has died, another is estranged from the family, yet another has surprised her rather conservative family with a black boyfriend. Playing push-me pull-you over even the most minor decisions, the couple recycle arguments in the terrifyingly relentless way of the truly intimate--so accurately, in fact, that some may find the lack of forward motion frustrating. Raphael's ear is pitched acutely to American speech, but the ferocious energy of the dialogue cannot carry the novel by itself; each episode remains a brilliant set piece in a linked dramatic structure. Already published and well-received in Britain, where Raphael is widely known, the novel succeeds as a graph of human volatility and a measure of a relationship's resilience. (May) FYI: Raphael's screenplay for Darling won an Oscar and his classic road-trip romance, Two for the Road, received a nomination. Most recently, he has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the already big-buzz forthcoming film, Eyes Wide Shut.