Title: Bay of Arrows
First published: 1992
Description: Jay Parini's previous novel, The Last Station (Holt, 1990), was described by Gore Vidal as "easily one of the best historical novels written in the last twenty years." Now, in Bay of Arrows, Parini redefines the genre of historical fiction itself. Geno, or Christopher Genovese, is a forty-two-year-old professor at a small Vermont college. His wife, Susan, finds him exasperating, while to his young sons, James and Milo, he is downright dangerous. Obsessed by the long poem about Columbus that he's been writing for years, he lets his family responsibilities slide. When he responds in kind to one of his favorite student's sexual overtures, he is really sunk. In the nick of time, the MacAlastair Foundation bestows upon Geno a tax-free "genius" grant in excess of a half million dollars: he takes off for a remote part of the Dominican Republic. Like Robinson Crusoe, he and his dumbstruck family begin life anew on an inlet called the Bay of Arrows. It was here, five hundred years before, that Columbus first met resistance in the New World, when the Taino Indians drove him away, back to Europe, with a shower of arrows. Juxtaposed to Geno's story is the story of Columbus retold in vivid, often comic vignettes: as a boy fishing off the coast of Genoa; courting the daughter of a wealthy family; begging for a royal sponsor; in the New World, encountering the naked daughter of a Taino chief; returning to Seville in chains. The novel's twin streams merge in a bizarre climax of magical realism worthy of a poet and novelist of Parini's stature. Bay of Arrows is a comic novel about history as projection and a witty expose of patriarchal power of the kind that informed the Columbus expeditions to the New World and continues to undermine even the most well-intentioned of contemporary marriages.
Subjects: Fiction, Fiction, general
Places: Dominican Republic
People: Christopher Columbus
LC classification: PS3566.A65 B3 1992