In Seaview, his second novel, Toby Olson has written half a good book. What is good about this novel is so good, so smart and so beautifully realized, that one instinctively resists the harsh judgment that the other half of the book deserves….

Seaview is the story of Allen, a golf player, and Melinda, his wife, who is dying of cancer. Accompanied by a sententious old Indian man named Bob White, they are driving across the United States, living out of motels and their automobile, making their way to Cape Cod, Melinda's home, where she wants to die….

It is Olson's sensitive portrayal of Allen and Melinda's relationship that makes the novel work as well as it does. He goes beyond the conventional assertion of contemporary fiction that there are unbridgeable spaces between lovers, and defines those spaces, giving them contours as sharp and clear as the sculptures of Brancusi. The uncommunicable is expressed as surely as is the blatant. Olson, the author of thirteen books of poetry, creates scenes of powerful beauty in his descriptions of the Western landscape, as when he juxtaposes the rugged magnificence of desert and mountain with the weary commonplaceness of a motel coffee shop.

Olson's most effective images are simple and naturalistic; when he constructs elaborate metaphors, they come off as labored. A scene in the middle of the novel, a twilight game at a ruined miniature golf course, contains what is clearly intended to be a central symbol for the book, the freshly severed head of a snake in the process of eating a baby bird. Presented as a hermetical emblem, the image seems merely contrived. Occasionally Olson indulges a passion for precise, endlessly detailed physical descriptions, telling us far more than we want to know about the exact spatial relationships of buildings, or the workings of mechanical contraptions, passages which are confusing and muddle the narrative flow. And there are a few disconcerting bits of lazy writing: a minor character is introduced with the name of George Wall, but six pages later he is called Fred Wall.

A strong credit to the novel—and there is no way to express it that doesn't sound left-handed—is that Olson makes golf not only interesting but powerfully suspenseful. I know very little about the sport, and always considered it rather silly, but I found the long narratives of golf games in Seaview as breathlessly engrossing as the best trashy thriller. Olson uses these scenes well, blending in philosophical and psychological insights about the game. He tells us more about a character in the way he putts than many a novelist is able to convey in pages of interior monologue.

The novel is a pleasure to read (when it is) because it does so many things. Olson successfully pulls off a sophisticated multiple-point-of-view structure in the first part of the book, slipping pages of first-person introspection into the omniscient narration in a way that doesn't seem "stuck in." Dream sequences, so often maddening distractions in ambitious fiction, here are well executed and fit, in an appropriately dreamlike way, into the scheme of the novel. The sex scenes are strange but altogether convincing, giving us significant insights into the characters.

The first half of Seaview, in short, does an impressive job of what the first half of a novel is supposed to do: interesting characters are drawn, suspenseful situations are created for them, thoughtful themes are introduced. The reader is captive, an eager believer, settled in for the rest of the ride. Then the book falls apart. Olson, inexplicably, jettisons everything he has done and starts over.

The action moves forward to the Seaview Links, a golf course on Cape Cod, which will be the final destination of Allen and Melinda. An entirely new cast of characters, vapid and cartoonish, is introduced, and a clutch of flimsy subplots is invented for them to walk through. Most dismaying, the tone shifts to one of comic fantasy which is completely at odds with what has come before. The golf sequences, with characters we don't care about, become excruciatingly dull. When scenes involving Allen and Melinda are spliced in, they stand up only by association with the earlier book, but nothing is gained by apposition with the lifeless Cape Cod whimsies.

It is difficult to imagine what compelled Olson to undercut his work in this way, unless it was to conform to the current fashion for fantasy, as seen in the novels of John Irving, what one might call creeping Garp-ism, which dictates that whenever fiction begins to be believable, the bizarre must be gratuitously injected, the reader must be bludgeoned into an awareness that "it's only make-believe."…

[There is] a ridiculous scene (reminiscent of the movie It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World) which brings together in riotous confusion radical-activist Indians, Hell's-Angels-style bikers, a pod of whales, the press corps, police, militant nudists, golfers, the armed forces, and hang-glider snipers…. When Olson finally gets around to winding up his main story, he has lost us. If it's all only make-believe, what do we care about Allen and Melinda?

The comic-fantasy episodes in Cape Cod, on their own, might have been credible, but the effect here might be compared to taking a copy of, say, The Scarlet Letter and shuffling it playing-card fashion with an "Archie" comic book. The result is disconcerting in the extreme and—one must say it—a failure. But the strong passages in the first part of the novel survive; they stay with you. It is worth reading the book for them.