The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Life with Swan by Paul West
David W. Madden

Paul West. Life with Swan. Scribner, 1999. 300 pp. $24.00.

Paul West has done it again—written another large-hearted novel that investigates life’s overlooked corners while celebrating the splendors of creation and the unpredictable. He is back in the stars, and for the first time in fiction recounts his experiences with the Viking and Voyager space expeditions. In many ways Life with Swan represents a delightful extension of his experiments with the roman à clef.
The narrator, a writer and professor, unexpectedly falls in love with a student, Ariada Mencken, the Swan of the title. As their relationship deepens, the professor follows Swan to Pathica where she begins graduate work, and the two quickly befriend one of the campus’s most famous celebrities, astronomer Raoul Bunsen.
To those familiar with West’s fiction and life, the principle characters are only thinly disguised, but the fun is with the absurd names he concocts for the minor characters—Asa Humanas, rare book librarian, Gloria Gluckstein, faculty party maven, Segundo Cieli, painter-pilot, but best of all are Bunsen’s wife and son, Nineveh and Ptolemy. West revels in the deliberately eccentric and finds in each of these figures some bit of comic delightfulness.
The descriptions of the couple’s life together are full of genuine moments and quirky details: their private language of love, the sound of Swan’s bicycle bell as she rides up the drive, a decanter’s glass stopper that throws captivating, prismatic light. As Swan says in one of the most moving passages, “You can appreciate the spectrum, or whatever that kind of thing, only if you have love of the usual kind. Without it the spectrum, the entire magnificence of the universe, is a cold block of steel, a nail file.”
This is exactly what West brings to fiction—the sense of empathic inspection that results from genuine love. West loves viewing and reviewing, creating, and language, glorious language, that medium that surrounds, defines, and informs everything. West is a treasure, and Life with Swan is a wonderful gem of a novel. [David W. Madden]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Life with Swan by Paul West David W. Madden Paul West. Life with Swan. Scribner, 1999. 300 pp. $24.00. Paul West has done it again—written another large-hearted novel that investigates life’s overlooked corners while celebrating the splendors of creation and the unpredictable. He is back in the stars, and for the first time in fiction recounts his experiences with the Viking and Voyager space expeditions. In many ways Life with Swan represents a delightful extension of his experiments with the roman à clef. The narrator, a writer and professor, unexpectedly falls in love with a student, Ariada Mencken, the Swan of the title. As their relationship deepens, the professor follows Swan to Pathica where she begins graduate work, and the two quickly befriend one of the campus’s most famous celebrities, astronomer Raoul Bunsen. To those familiar with West’s fiction and life, the principle characters are only thinly disguised, but the fun is with the absurd names he concocts for the minor characters—Asa Humanas, rare book librarian, Gloria Gluckstein, faculty party maven, Segundo Cieli, painter-pilot, but best of all are Bunsen’s wife and son, Nineveh and Ptolemy. West revels in the deliberately eccentric and finds in each of these figures some bit of comic delightfulness. The descriptions of the couple’s life together are full of genuine moments and quirky details: their private language of love, the sound of Swan’s bicycle bell as she rides up the drive, a decanter’s glass stopper that throws captivating, prismatic light. As Swan says in one of the most moving passages, “You can appreciate the spectrum, or whatever that kind of thing, only if you have love of the usual kind. Without it the spectrum, the entire magnificence of the universe, is a cold block of steel, a nail file.” This is exactly what West brings to fiction—the sense of empathic inspection that results from genuine love. West loves viewing and reviewing, creating, and language, glorious language, that medium that surrounds, defines, and informs everything. West is a treasure, and Life with Swan is a wonderful gem of a novel. [David W. Madden]

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