THE BANKS OF THE SEA

Carol Gamewell, a Navy veteran from Vietnam, has returned to New York after several years in Europe because he's "curious about America." This natural curiositywhich motivates him both as a poet and as a loverdrives him up and down the streets of Lower Manhattan in search of his "Peaceable Kingdom." What he finds are the people of the lofts, the storefronts, the cheap hotelsjunkies, hookers, johns, fairies, bums, hippiesbut especially young women on the loose, girls who have come from across the Hudson to exercise their new-found freedom to burn their bras as well as their candles in what is obviously an escape to Manhattan.

But for Carol, with Vietnam behind him, Manhattan is more than available women, drugs, and the familiar haunts of poets and artists who follow the Beats. It is the landscape for his kind of poetry, for as he puts it, "The city was all around him and everything was for sale, strangers proffering useless items at incomprehensible terms." Carol's walk on the wild side, which includes a brief stay in Bellevue, has all of the intensity of a love-hate relationship that is reminiscent of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn", but with a noticeable difference, a generational difference. Tindall's Carol Gamewell sees his Manhattan with a poet's eye, blending realistic detail with lines of poetry and passages of dramatic dialogue. As one character describes him, he is a "young poet making a name for himself. Vietnam vet. A splendid existential hero, don't you think?" The Banks of the Sea is Carol's love-hate relationship with Manhattan, its people and streets; it is one man's escape from New York.

This is a "literary" novel out of the Henry Miller school of writing. But while Miller's work displays subtle coherence, supple prose and fresh philosophy, Tindall's (Great Heads) second novel is a confusion of high- and low-born phrases and little else. ("You are the sweet ouch knee, the grassy sprain, and I am the mechanic at the valley.") This last refers to the act of fornication, something the protagonist, Vietnam vet Carol Gamewell, engages in quite frequently. The book is mostly a group of well-turned phrases in search of a story, and what little coherent vignettes there are search vainly for a narrative voice. The novel switches back and forth from third to first person to dizzying effect, and it requires such an investment of effort to make sense of Carol's odyssey in 1960s New York City that the reader is better off returning to Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.