Life with Swan

One must feel a bit sorry for Alix Wilbur and Roger Kimball, so tuckered are they from days spent ruminating their television viewing schedule for the week they find themselves up to little more than prose in which the simple declaratives line up like busses at the tired curbs of their imaginations. No, West is not in love with the sound of his own voice. He may, however, be guilty of a love affair that may rival the one he describes in _Life With Swan_: an affair with the music of language and the triumph of imagination such music nurtures. Certainly, West's work is not for readers of "airport fiction"; hence Wilbur's and Kimball's exasperation. West's approach, rather, is to combat the message, continually drummed into us by the Wilburs and Kimballs of the world, that we must expect and accept the apotheosis of mediocrity in the culture we create, the lives we lead. This may explain the juxtaposition West establishes between the 25-year love affair evoked in _Swan_ and the lovers' proximity to the visionaries involved in the launches of the Viking I and II space probes. Drawn into the realm of the universal and its Magellans, where the minds they encounter have solved the riddle of the Sun and posited the science of exobiology, the narrator and Swan, writer and poet, both little more than amateur astronomers, find themselves both humbled before science and elevated by the effect it has on their imaginations. Newly conscious of his status as "star stuff," those atoms we hold in common with such distant neighbors as the moons of Saturn, canal-laced Mars, and the numbered stars and planets astronomers chance upon as they "bore holes into space," the narrator, turning earthward, is confirmed in his suspicion that there is nothing quotidian about the phenomena in which we play out our days. All of this phenomena he brings to bear in his attempt to create an artifact of language that might due justice to the love and life he's shared with Swan. Such an artifact may occasionally lapse into solipsism, but it's interest in the other's species of solipsism (in fiction, manifest in elements such as style and voice), those peculiar flourishes of the individual of which we see less and less today, that nourishes the arts. The narrative proximity of such an undisguised roman à clef might temp a writer of more limited range with endless opportunities to wallow in the mire of lugubrious sentimentality or sniping personal attack. West deftly avoids such transgressions. Perhaps it's undisguised nature (a partial legend is offered in the jacket notes) has a chastening effect. His worst sin, if one can call it that, is his repeated references to Penn State University, where he taught some twenty years, as "Pigskin University." One supposes only the most rabid alumni would take issue with the epithet, and certainly not while waiting for their coveted season tickets to arrive courtesy the FedEx van. In these depressing days of