The Sea.

John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, a slim, introspective novel on death and grief, written from the perspective of a middle-aged thesaurus. It’s a demanding read that brims with ideas and contains many sparkling turns of phrase while simultaneously maddening with the narrator-protagonist’s bloviating style and endless desire to show off his vocabulary.

Max Harden is a retired art historian who has recently lost his wife, Anna, to some sort of aggressive cancer, after which he revisits the seaside cottage where he’d spent time one summer and had first encountered death and loss, although exactly how that occurred is saved until the very end of the novel. (The reveal is similar in tone to that of another Booker winner, the marvelous The Sense of an Ending, but the latter book does it far more effectively.) He splits his meandering narrative across three separate timelines – the end of Anna’s life; the summer he spent with another family, the Graces, at their cottage; and the present day as he’s returned to the sea and found connections to the past.

There’s a profound sense throughout Max’s story that he’s still struggling to process his own grief in the face of several shocking losses, something he seems to cover up through his own dissembling, almost in parody of the British stiff-upper-lip stereotype, the man who can look at and even identify his feelings but refuses to engage with them. The reader never gets to know Max at all; he’s the astute observer, in the style of Nick Jenkins, but lacks any discernable personality traits of his own, other than, perhaps, his ability to keep his own grief off the pages. The only real indication we get that these deaths have affected him comes near the end, when a bout of drinking leaves him with a head injury and eventually brings his adult daughter around to try to coax him to come live with her, especially as she’s afraid he may have tried to take his own life. Even then, he can barely conjure up the emotions any father should feel for his daughter, not least the reversal of roles that comes when your children have grown and begin to wish to take care of you.

I mentioned the novel’s vocabulary above; Banville may have all of these words at his immediate disposal, but just because you know a word doesn’t always mean it’s the right choice for that situation. Here’s a sampler of esoteric words I encountered in the book, most of which I didn’t know previously: rufous, immanence, minatory, eructations, aperçu, anabasis, expatiation, putative, vulgate, refulgent, vavasour, plangent. I looked up all of the words on that list (and more) that I didn’t know, or of which I was unsure, and yet have forgotten most of them in the book’s wake. Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book stilted, claustrophobic, and pretentious, while referring to Max as a gloomy narcissist, and even though I clearly liked the book more than she did (low bar, I know), I can’t argue with her criticisms. The occasional use of a twenty-dollar word in lieu of a ten-cent one can be fun for writer and reader, illuminating the page, signaling a shift in tone or sparking a thought in the reader’s mind, but when you’re regularly reaching for the OED, using minatory when menacing would have sufficed, you’re trying too hard.

Banville had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize once prior to this win, for the superior The Book of Evidence, a twisted novel in both senses of the term, one that also has a narrator writing at some remove from his emotions but does so in a way that heightens the tension rather than suffocating it. His win in 2005 was not well-received, as The Sea beat Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous Never Let Me Go and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, both of which would have been better choices, as well as highly-regarded novels by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. It does, however, illustrate one of the criticisms of major literary awards – their tendency to reward their own, to be slow to recognize cultural and stylistic shifts, and to excessively honor works that draw heavily on or even mimic the classics of the western canon. I could live with a little pretension if the book took me on an emotional journey, but The Sea seemed to prefer to send me to the dictionary instead.

Next up: I’m just about finished with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, another Booker winner, after which I’ll turn to this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Richard Powers’ The Overstory.