Seaview - (Rediscovery) by Toby Olson (Paperback)

About the Book

The action of Toby Olson's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel "Seaview" sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod. Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a golf course there that is laid out on tribal grounds. Throughout the journey, Allen knows he is being stalked by a former friend, Richard, a drug-pusher whom he has crossed and who is now determined to murder him. The tortured lives of Richard and his wife Gerry stand as a dream of what might have become of Allen and Melinda had things been otherwise. The lines that draw these people together converge at Seaview Links, and on the mad battlefield that this golf course becomes, the novel reaches its complex ending. "Seaview's" vibrant language and fateful plot make this study of an America on the edge an unforgettable read.

Book Synopsis

The action of Toby Olson's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Seaview sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod

Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a golf course there that is laid out on tribal grounds. Throughout the journey, Allen knows he is being stalked by a former friend, Richard, a drug-pusher whom he has crossed and who is now determined to murder him. The tortured lives of Richard and his wife Gerry stand as a dream of what might have become of Allen and Melinda had things been otherwise. The lines that draw these people together converge at Seaview Links, and on the mad battlefield that this golf course becomes, the novel reaches its complex ending. Seaview's vibrant language and fateful plot make this study of an America on the edge an unforgettable read.

Review Quotes

"Even a remarkable dreamer of nightmares like Nathanael West might have been hard-pressed to top the book's finale . . . Seaview . . . is a very inventive work, unlike any other recent American novel in the freshness of its approach and vision." --The New York Times Book Review

"Toby Olson is a superior writer of stylish and impelling prose, a storyteller of power, a recorder of human truths and a visionary." --Doris Grumback, National Public Radio

"The description of the game [of golf] is nicely and leisurely paced; it is suitably precise and concentrated, and the evocation of the players and the tensions that animate them is masterful." --The New Republic

"Everything in this brilliant, meditative vision of America is there to be lost as the characters, shaped by a state-of-not-knowing, acknowledge their emblematic roles and rehearse their leave-taking. Every day could be the last. In Seaview Toby Olson has sustained with a loving attention to detail one long ending of such beauty, courage and tenderness that it is more than a match for the concluding apocalyptic assault." --PEN/Faulkner Award Citation

About the Author

TOBY OLSON has published eight novels--the most recent of which, The Blond Box, appeared from Fiction Collective-2 in 2003--and numerous books of poetry, including Human Nature (New Directions). A new novel, The Bitter Half, is forthcoming. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olson's novel Seaview received the PEN/Faulkner award for the Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction in 1983. Toby Olson lives in Philadelphia and in North Truro, on Cape Cod.