=Books recently read=

The Sea by John Banville. Max Morden is a recently widowed man on the farther side of middle-age. He's depressed, shattered, drinking too much. After the long-drawn death of his wife, life has lost it's savor. His work as a self-admittedly second-rate scholar of the painter Pierre Bonnard has stalled, stopped, and he's stranded on the roadside without AAA. Nothing seems to matter. How does he go on, because he sure can't say where he's at. He's trying to find, as Eliot wrote, a face to meet the faces that he meets, a way to keep living—or let's not be so grand—a way to keep existing in the suddenly emptier world in which he is still condemned, short of self-extinction (and don't think he hasn't thought of it) to exist. 

Unable to bear living in the house he once shared with his wife, Max needs somewhere else to go. It's pure instinct that draws him back to the small beach community where his family—mother, father, and himself as the only issue of this unhappy union—traveled yearly for their summer holiday. It is significantly the scene where a younger, more innocent Max fell in love for the first time and where he suffered his first tragic loss. 

The pubescent boy and the middle-aged man have much in common. Both periods in Max's life were passages, both had something momentous to teach him. But though the lesson was basically the same, it is only now that Max is older and arguably wiser that he is ready to appreciate what he was then, perhaps mercifully, too young to fully understand. The child, as another poet famously said, this time Wordsworth, is father to the man. 

The memory of that long-ago summer merges with the last twelve months during which Max witnessed the slow wasting of his wife to a relentless cancer. Past and present weave together a net of associations strong enough to tangle poor Max in melancholia for what remains of his foreshortened life. There is a chance, perhaps, that this net will also save him from the depths of a grief in which he seems to be inexorably drowning. Just as likely it will form a length of rope by which he might hang himself and end at once what begins to seem more and more the futility of enduring a gray and pointless half-life, what is, in fact, a death-in-life.

His room at the Cedars is a kind of prison, or a monk's cell, and it's meager habitues, including the caretaker, are likewise souls in limbo. The inn itself is ghost of what it was once upon a time. In the long-ago summer of Max's childhood, it was the vacation home of the Grace family. It was Chloe Grace with whom Max first fell in love. To be perfectly accurate, it was her mother, Mrs. Grace, who was very first, but it was her daughter Chloe who eventually replaced the unattainable Mrs. Grace. It was Chloe with whom Max experienced the physical, as well as psychological, transports of adoration. There were complications, of course. Chloe's mute twin brother Myles, the melancholy young governess Rose, the aforementioned Mrs. Grace, seductive and Ceres-like; and Mr. Grace, her husband, an unpredictable, satyr-like man who seemed to young Max leeringly comical and potentially dangerous, an Oedipal nightmare in the flesh. Last but most significantly, there was Chloe herself, a tomboy outgrowing the boy in her, awkwardly experimenting with the powerful weaponry of a womanhood to which she is heir and whose power to hurt and to heal she still doesn't understand—and using Max as her hapless target.

What has gone without saying so far and yet is the most important thing to say about John Banville and The Sea is the utterly breathtaking beauty of the writing. Banville's prose is an excruciating pleasure, the way the sensations of a lover who knows just how to touch you can be excruciating. You know the orgasm to which you're inexorably climbing will be exhilarating, but you don't feel you can endure the pleasure at this altitude for long, and for that reason alone you wish it to be done. You feel your body will overload, seize up, collapse. That your very heart or some delicate vessel in your brain must explode. You're thankful that The Sea is less than 200 pages long. You don't feel you could bear the intensity much longer. Even as you are experiencing it you are thinking of how later, in recollection, you will be able to appreciate it again, and, perhaps, even better. That's how intense Banville's prose is, what a mark it leaves on you later, echoing inside of you like the sound and rhythm of the tide long after you've left the beach. Banville is one of those rarest of writers—like Woolf, like Proust—who describe with an exactitude and subtlety emotions, thoughts, trains of perception that seem never to have been put into words before, or, if they had, never with such illuminating, revelatory precision.

The way that Banville ties together both stories—his wife's death and the tragedy of the Grace family that summer—at the end of The Sea is devastating: a profound summing up of the significance of one human life in the face of eternity and cosmic indifference. It is not a sunny end, but The Sea is not a book without humor; in fact, just the opposite. 

Opposed to the grimmest of realities, there is the voice of a comic Job in Max Morden, heir as he is to the characters of Beckett, who never cease complaining but do so in an entertainingly, soothing medicinal language that takes life as something of a slapstick farce, though no less any tragic for that. By this means, Banville's Max both eases the pain and indicts the God or fate or blind necessity that afflicts him (and us), the cruel impersonality of events that eventually pluck off our wings and legs and leave us to writhe in agony like a worm in the mud before the sole of what amounts to a great boot crushes us out of consciousness altogether.

No John Banville's The Sea won't cure what ails you, but it'll make it a little easier to suffer through it and that is about as much as we can reasonably expect of any medication when the disease with which we are afflicted—mortality—leaves no possibility of a cure.