[In the following review, Rosenheim offers a tempered assessment of Bay of Arrows, which he characterizes as a “campus novel.”]

Christopher “Geno” Genovese is a forty-two year-old poet, teaching at a small college in Vermont and suffering from a fairly standard mid-life crisis. His writing has come to a virtual standstill, his marriage is weakening, his two young sons seem remote and unintelligible to him. As in most campus novels, little is made in Bay of Arrows of Geno’s professional commitments; predictably, his relations with students are represented by one joyless seduction of a two-dimensional female undergraduate.

Accused by the seduced student of sexual harassment, Geno is rescued from professional disgrace and personal ruin by the timely (and improbable) intervention of the MacAlistair Foundation, which awards him half-a-million dollars and frees him from the straitjacket of college life. Geno and his family go south to the Dominican Republic, and he builds a house on the coast at the very place in which Christopher Columbus, the protagonist of his unfinished long poem, first encountered resistance from the natives.

This links the novel with its main subplot, an alternating narrative that follows Columbus as he enlists support for his expedition from the Spanish Court then bravely sails west. Perfunctory, underdeveloped, this smaller story none the less outpaces its weightier counterpart, perhaps because it has the natural advantage of an interesting main character. Columbus is presented as an obsessive fantasist, an amoral egoist incapable of being deterred from his compulsive geo-mania.

The focus of this novel, however, remains on the diminished figure of Geno, although the attention is undermined by an occasional shift to his wife, who has yearnings of her own, and by an inconsistency of viewpoint—sometimes all we see is what he sees, at others we have a glimpse of a wider horizon. Bay of Arrows is essentially a campus novel, despite its geographical and historical shifts. Most appealing when quirkiest and poetic (there is a lovely surreal concluding masque), it is least apt when invoking the comic conventions of its genre.