The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Pieces of Payne, by Albert Goldbarth
reviewed by James Sallis

Albert Goldbarth. Pieces of Payne. Graywolf, 2003. 214 pp. Paper: $15.00.

Reading Albert Goldbarth is like watching the valedictory address at a university created by a merger between Clown College and MIT. His poetry is aggressively intelligent, full of pratfalls and rimshots, and, embracing low culture as readily as high, science as readily as literature, encyclopedic in a manner far more common to novelists such as Pynchon and McElroy. In this, Goldbarth’s first novel, readers of his poetry will recognize some familiar roof-jumping. Here’s the story: Eliza Phillips meets former teacher Albert Goldbarth for drinks, during which she speaks of her divorce and recent lesbian marriage, of celestial order and beauty, and of growing up in the home of her philandering, surgical-superstar father. But the hanger gives no notion of the clothing hung thereon. The meeting comprises eighty-seven pages. Remaining pages consist of footnotes and commentary. Everything gets thrown into the hopper—news items, verse, appointment books, quotations, lists, mini-essays—as the novel’s long legs stride as Yeats’s fly over subjects as disparate as Columbus, werewolves, Fanny Burney’s nineteenth-century mastectomy, Moby-Dick, ancient Japan, a man with fiberglass tiger-whiskers implanted in his upper lip, quantum physics, supermarket tabloids, the Legion of Super-Heroes. The title commemorates astronomer Cecilia Payne, a role model for Eliza. “I wanted big theories that unified,” Eliza says of her parents’ divorce and her early fascination with astronomy. One cannot read Pieces of Payne without thinking of Hopscotch or of Nabokov’s poem-and-exegesis Pale Fire, but Goldbarth is, as always, much his own man. Impossible to mistake the author here: the play of this man’s mind over the landmarks and detritus of our time. Eliza’s conversation sets off and fans to flame sparks in Goldbarth’s mind that cannot fail to ignite the reader’s.