Book Review: Pieces of Payne

Pieces of Payne

Graywolf, 221 pp., $15 (paper)

Albert Goldbarth, author of more than 25 books of poetry and essays, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written his first novel. Pieces of Payne concerns itself with news from the life of a young astronomer wannabe named Eliza Phillips. Pieces of Payne, because Eliza has heavily identified her life (even down to snagging herself a Russian husband) with that of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the foremost astronomers in history.

Eliza's got plenty of news and it's all spilling out, with sidebars into her parents' divorce years before, with rhapsodies on celestial beauty, with what it was like to have a surgical-oncologist superstar for a father, with what we eagerly discover the rest of, listening along while she pours her tale, over several drinks, into the academically enhanced ears of a certain professor Albert Goldbarth, her former teacher. Which means Eliza's spilled beans are being filtered through our hearkening narrator's mind, a mind so learned that its island universe of self has become a sort of island small town where everybody knows everybody else, and nobody can move far without bumping into several neighbors simultaneously.

The way Goldbarth -- the professor, the author, the narrator, all of them -- organizes this story is reminiscent of James Burke's Connections series of scientific history videos, except that instead of the constituents being joined through complex and sometimes unexpected linkages of mechanical cause and effect, the connections are of an omnicultural resonance. And so we're treated, through frequent narrative digressions and a series of footnotes even longer than the novel proper, to a wealth of detailed musings on everything from Moby Dick to Erotica Judaica, from Robert Silverberg's multiple pseudonyms to Charles Dickens' mistress, from the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder to the marriage of Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

This dense salvo of information, abetted by the jewellike bits of prose one would expect from a poet of Goldbarth's caliber, riddles readers into the narrator's perspective and draws us more deeply into his charge's unfolding drama. It allows us so many facets of joy in Payne before we're whacked -- oh, shit, no -- by the story's final revelation. Get out your telescope, book lover: Here's a new star in the firmament.