[In the following excerpt, Downing complains that the individual sonnets in The Golden Gate lack intensity and that the story lacks depth.]

Vikram Seth is mad about sonnets. The Golden Gate consists of a staggering five hundred and ninety of them strung together to form a verse novel. Even the bio page, acknowledgments, dedication, and table of contents are written in sonnet form. Seth's sonnets depart, however, from the traditional English line laid down by Wyatt and Surrey in that they rarely aspire to be, in Rossetti's phrase, a "moment's monument." Rather, they trace their ancestry back to Pushkin, placing high value on wit and effervescence. To achieve these effects, Seth favors quick, playful tetrameter over the more ponderous pentameter. Here Seth, anticipating the inevitable clamor of objections to his atavistic approach, cannily issues a preemptive apology:

       How do I justify this stanza?
       These feminine rhymes? My wrinkled muse?
       This whole passé extravaganza?
       How can I (careless of time) use
       The dusty bread molds of Onegin
       In the brave bakery of Reagan?

If the pairing of Onegin with Reagan (or the odious metaphor that frames it) made you wince, The Golden Gate is not your book. Yet I would add, in limited defense of Seth, that the kind of crass collision exemplified by this rhyme is what The Golden Gate is largely about. Set in San Francisco circa 1980, it is a yuppie epic at once celebrating and satirizing the city's cultural pretensions. Enraptured lovers, who meet through a singles ad, "In phrase both fulsome and condign / Sing praise of California wine." Liz works as an attorney, John in Silicon Valley where he "kneels bareheaded and unshod / Before the Chip, a jealous God." Other characters spend weekends pickling olives or haunting cafés through which strains of Bach are eternally wafting. Homer's sea suffers a change into a lawyer's "wine-dark suit." Cats are given chardonnay to drink, pet iguanas quiche to nibble on.

All this might be funnier if it weren't so dated. Seven years after its publication, The Golden Gate already seems like a mildly amusing artifact of that excessive time when (in its own words) "the syndrome of possessions" reached epidemic proportions, and when AIDS had yet to cast the darkest portion of its shadow over San Francisco. Seth's sonnets are best suited to light subjects and mock-heroic catalogues, as in this blithe romp through contemporary materialism:

       John looks about him with enjoyment.
       What a man needs, he thinks, is health;
       Well-paid, congenial employment;
       A house; a modicum of wealth;
       Some sunlight; coffee and the papers;
       Artichoke hearts adorned with capers;
       A Burberry trench coat; a Peugeot;
       And in the evening, some Rameau
       Or Couperin; a home-cooked dinner,
       A Stilton, and a little port;
       And so to duvet …

Or here, where the responses John receives to his singles ad amount to a compendium of Bay Area perversities:

       Yes, why describe the louche lubricious
       Dreams of a Daly City Dame,
       The half-enticing, subtly vicious
       Burblings of Belle from Burlingame,
       And then from Eve of San Francisco,
       "Six novel ways of using Crisco,"
       Or the Tigress of Tiburon
       Who waits to pounce on hapless John.

These passages are pleasing in the clever way they comically enact the velocity, skittishness, and empty plenitude of urban America. But when Seth turns his attention to weightier matters, the results can be disastrous. In his long diatribe against nuclear weapons, Seth's sophistication on the subject rarely rises above the level of an average shrill rock 'n' roll band. Quoting these lines, I am truly embarrassed for him:

       It takes a great deal of moral clarity
       To see that it is right to blitz
       Each Russian family to bits
       Because their leader's muscularity
       —Quite like our own—on foreign soil
       Threatens our vanity, or 'our' oil.

Thankfully, such patches of wretched writing are relatively scarce, as are the obvious instances where Seth scrambles clumsily to complete a rhyme—"Sulawesi" laboring to chime with "crazy," or "et al." forced under the yoke with "Senegal." Given the book's length and formal constraints, a certain number of glaring surface imperfections are nearly inevitable, perhaps even forgivable. In fact, Seth is to be partially commended for his overall fluency; the sonnets slide in and out of each other with scarcely a hitch.

Ironically, it is just this fluency that most damages The Golden Gate. The scathing review received by one of the book's characters, a sculptor, seems to mirror Seth's own fear of critical persecution:

                  … the languid tedium
       Of lines too fluid to show pains
       Reflect this artist's dated chains:
       Derivative, diluted passion,
       A facile versatility …

For smoothness has been achieved only at great expense. In order to accommodate novelistic sweep, the poetry has been stripped of its focused intensities; very few individual sonnets could stand on their own foundations. Equally, the fiction has been severely simplified and reduced to fit into the sonnets's fourteen-line containers.

The plot, by the way, is really too innocuous to warrant much discussion. Suffice it to say that couples couple, uncouple, and then recouple in curious combinations; spirits, like the seasons, rise and fall; with two deaths and a birth in the final pages, tragic and uplifting elements mingle mawkishly. More interesting than the story itself is the fact that Seth chooses to parcel it out into such small packages. I suspect at least a few of his reasons for doing so are mimetic in nature. The use of sonnets says something about contemporary San Francisco: that many of the city's residents would like to think of their lives as the experiential equivalents of sonnets, as classically trim little epiphanies marching happily—ABAB—toward the well-heeled, tidy closure of GG. "Life's a sonnet!" might be the motto for yet another of those bumperstickers of which Californians are inordinately fond. Naturally, the characters' desire for shapely order is constantly crossed and frustrated in The Golden Gate by the world's inescapable vicissitudes (break-ups, death, bad reviews) and this tug of fantasy against reality is effectively heightened by the use of sonnets: Form remains stable while content veers toward entropy.

Yet despite Seth's ambition, The Golden Gate is neither good poetry nor good fiction. In attempting to bridge two genres, it falls between them. Instead of buttressing and enabling each other, the verse tends to hobble the narrative, the narrative to compromise the verse. The genres, in Seth's hands at least, are like an arranged marriage: not deeply compatible. One is nearly always conscious of the story straining against its poetic leash. In turn, the poetry is given free reign only during brief lyric interludes (encomia for landscape, an invocation of the city's patron saint) before being retethered to the plot. Like the game of Scrabble played in Chapter 8, The Golden Gate is limited by rules of its own devising. It moves deftly enough about its board; unfortunately, that board is a small one.