This is the best book I have read all year, if not for longer.
It isn’t in our usual genres, it’s a mimetic novel about some people in San Francisco in 1980, working in defense software, falling in love, falling out of love, sculpting, driving, dating, having conversations about TinTin, having kids, dying, coping with death, getting married, having parties, having social anxiety, protesting about nuclear proliferation—you know, the kinds of things people do. But in The Golden Gate, they do it all in awesome tetrameter sonnets.
This could be a gimmick, but it isn’t at all. The poetry is wonderful. If you like words, and if you like words put together well, if you find that satisfying, then this is a feast. And it really is a novel, full of characters and plot. Indeed, the only thing wrong with this book is that the whole time I was reading it—twice in the same week—I kept wanting to read bits of it aloud to the people around me. No, my other complaint is that it made me laugh aloud several times in public, and it made me cry just as I needed to get onto a train.
Before I read it, I couldn’t really get my head around the fact that it really is a novel and not a book of poetry. Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy reading poetry collections. But I was expecting a set of poems that added up to a novel in your head sideways, not something like this. It’s hard to quote selectively because, like most novels, you need to know the characters. The characters are memorable complex people. But look at this, which I think gives the flavour and stands alone:
John looks downwards, as if admonished,
Then slowly lifts his head, and sighs.
Half fearfully and half astonished,
They look into each other’s eyes.
The waiter, bearded, burly, macho,
Says, “Madam, though it’s cold, gazpacho
Is what I’d recommend. Noisettes
Of lamp, perhaps, or mignoninettes
Of veal to follow….” Unavailing
Are his suggestions. Nothing sinks
Into their ears. “Ah, well,” he thinks,
“They’re moonstruck. It’ll be plain sailing.
Lovers, despite delays and slips
And rotten service, leave large tips.”
Sometimes a conversation will flow across sonnet after sonnet. There’s one point where there’s a speech at a rally that does this. One reason I read it again so quickly was that I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just that I was swept away with the virtuosity of the thing, I wanted to see that it really did hold together novelistically even when you know the plot. It does. Another reason I re-read it right away was that I loved the process of reading it so much I wanted more. And then also I wanted to tell all of you about it.
If you are the kind of person who hates poetry, don’t bother. I understand that. I can’t get with comics. But if you read the sonnet above and enjoyed it, and if you can face the thought of a book about some geeky but non-fantastical people in San Francisco and the Bay area in 1980, then this is a treat waiting for you. As well as being beautiful, it’s a good story—it would be a good story in prose. It may also be worth noting that there are people of varied ethnicities and sexual orientations in a way that more closely resembles real life than most novels purporting to be realistic.
But if you think writing a whole complex novel in verse is an odd thing to do, you’re not the only one.
An editor at a plush party
(Well-wined, -provisioned, speechy, hearty)
Hosted by (long live!) Thomas Cook
Where my Tibetan travel book
Was honored – seized my arm: “Dear fellow,
What’s your next work?” “A novel…” “Great!
We hope that you, dear Mr Seth – ”
“In verse”, I added. He turned yellow.
“How marvelously quaint,” he said,
And subsequently cut me dead.
There are books I admire, and books I enjoy, and sometimes there are books I want to hug and share with all my friends. This is one of the latter kind. I like Seth’s novels in prose a great deal, but I just adore this.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I almost stopped reading this review as soon as you said “poetry”. My resistance to anything poetry is incredibly high, mostly because these days poetry seems to be synonymous with blank verse, the poetic form for lazy slobs. (And here I indict myself. I’ve written poetry, and it was blank verse. Of course, I later repented.) My eyes must have glazed over the word “sonnet” in my haste to dismiss it.
I did get far enough to read your excerpt. And… this! This! It has meter! It rhymes! I’m ready to love it on those grounds alone.
I have the other Vikram Seth novel you’ve reviewed in my wishlist, and I may have to add this as well.
I love this book so much I have been known to press it into peoples’ hands. Thanks for the validation!
Thank you for this. I loved A Suitable Boy, which I ordered after reading a brief review, having no idea how enormous it was. Although I was aware of this book, I had never looked for it, for the same reason I might never have read A Suitable Boy if I had actually had it in my hands and realized how HUGE it was…
‘Buy me before good sense insists
You’ll strain your purse and sprain your wrists’
(from memory, I’m sitting in a coffee shop, sorry if I got it wrong)
I’ve passed it by from a lack of ambition, only.
He’s great, isn’t he, Vikram Seth? And funny. When I was about a third of the way through A Suitable Boy, I heard him read a selection from it on the radio, and I realized, chagrined, that I had missed a lot of the humour through taking it too seriously. I started over. I still remember Mrs. Rupa Mehra and her gulab jamins with great affection. It is one of those books that have made a permanent place for themselves in my brain, changing my terms of reference for the world.
I’m gonna go order The Golden Gate. Thank you!
My resistance to anything poetry is incredibly high, mostly because these days poetry seems to be synonymous with blank verse, the poetic form for lazy slobs.
Well, first, I think you probably mean ‘free verse’, not ‘blank verse’, inasmuch as I assume you don’t think Shakespeare, Marlowe, Wordsworth, and Milton were slackers.
Second, I used to think that about free verse, too — when I was 13. I grew up.
I have a very enjoyable collection of some of Seth’s other poetry, including some translations of Chinese poems, called All You Who Sleep Tonight, and I own The Golden Gate, but I have bounced off it so far. I’ll have to give it another try.
My recollection (and Wikipedia confirms this) is that the verse structure Seth uses is the Onegin stanza (which Puskhin devised in Russian for his novel in verse Eugene Onegin), which is indeed a sonnet but with an idiosyncratic rhyme scheme, neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean, as detailed above. I note this to point out that Seth is following a distinguished precedent.
Wikipedia also informs me that, like Eugene Onegin, The Golden Gate is being adapted into an opera. Not by Tchaikovsky, though.
Oh, this sounds wonderful. And the library has it, so I’ve just placed it on hold.
I remember reading this with the kind of glee you get from watching any virtuoso performance. The kind that leaves your cheeks sore from grinning. And you’re right that while it’s chock full of hoopdedoodle, it’s also a perfectly fine story about interesting and well-realized characters.
Whatever happened to my copy? I read two separate reviews of this book when it came out (both rhymed) and bought my own as soon as I could. It combines two of my great loves, San Francisco in the 1980s and epic poetry.
Once upon a time, about 1980,
There lived a man. His name was John…
I remember reading huge chunks of it aloud to my best friend in those days.
Bugsybanana: I haven’t yet read his other poems. I will look out for them.
Yes, yes, yes. I read this when it came out, and I was living in San Francisco, and again about 10 years later. I’ve since pressed it on many people — most recently just a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t know what it is about this book that is so incredible. I’ve tried repeatedly to learn to appreciate poetry, but it always feels like just so many words arranged more or less randomly. Golden Gate is different. I was moved to tears both times I read it.
I loved this book when it first came out, and have since lost my copy !(If it was mine…it might have been borrowed.)
I couldn’t believe that it could be done, and done well. Yet it was… sonnet after sonnet — but if you didn’t let the format distract you, you could see that the story worked as a story, and as prose.
Then someone pointed out to me that the subject is love — every possible kind of love. From romantic, to father/son, to friends– all the way down to the love a guy had for his pet iguana!
Seth covered it all. All in sonnets.
Plus: the blurb was a sonnet. The author bio was a sonnet.
The table of contents, with the title of each chapter, reads as a sonnet. (Am I remembering that right? I don’t have a copy on hand.)
If you think free verse is free, you are doing it wrong.
I not only read this when it came out, I got to watch Seth writing some of it, I realized later. Reviews mentioned that he’d been writing it in a bookstore in Palo Alto. We used to walk over there of an evening, and notice the Indian chap writing in the corner, buried behind the bookshelves.
The book came out right before my other adventures in Onegin stanza; I was in the chorus of a local opera company, and we were doing Eugen Onegin in Russian. Our scores were all in Russian, with phonetic pronunciations scribbled in, so in order to figure out what was going on, I looked out a translation which was itself in the same meter.
So for me, not only a great book about/around my then-adopted area, but also with extra resonances.
NOW you’re talking, Jo! :-)
The Golden Gate is more to my taste. Thank you.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
— Wallace Stevens
Vikram Seth is brilliant and marvelous.
Love, C.
A difficult book for me. I read it all, alternating between delight and boredom, and in the end concluded that it was… a book I had read.
As a story I liked it well enough – I was certainly pleased that John’s romance, and his life in general, did not go in what felt like the obvious direction. Parts of it I found very moving.
The verse was a problem for me though – parts felt brilliant, parts felt like an opera that’s all recitative. It’s the first time I’ve read an entire novel in verse and in the end I came down against it.
Eventually I realised that the real problem might just be that I find too much enjambment
profoundly irritating – and I recognise that that may not be true for other readers.
@11 You remember rightly that the ToC reads as a sonnet.
I might never have found out about this book otherwise, and although the subject matter would never have caught me, the form does as I love poetry and have studied prosody.
Thank you for writing about it.
Vikram Seth is freaking wonderful. “A Suitable Boy” is one of my favorite books.
i would like to read vikram seth’s THE GOLDEN GATE novel.but i don’t know that how i read the full novel in online.please help me…
CHARU: The full novel isn’t online, you will have to buy it. This will cost you money, but it’s how writers make a living so they can afford to eat and write more books, so you can rest assured that your $10 will be well spent.
I have decided to do my m.phil project on Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. I have much confidence to do my research in Seth’s novel, because I did my last research in his A Suitable Boy. but stil, your review gives me enough motivation. I hope to enjoy the poetic novel and to add a feather in my cap, by doing this research.
Are there other contemporary novels in verse (for adults) anyone here can suggest? The only ones I can find are for kids.
Ken