Volume 4, Number 7 · May 6, 1965
Poet's Novel, Novel Poem
By John Thompson
The (Diblos) Notebook
by James Merrill
Atheneum, 147 pp., $4.50
Two Brothers
by Philip Toynbee
Harper & Row, 159 pp., $6.00
The (Diblos) Notebook is the second novel of James Merrill, who has published also three books of poems and two plays. The 'Diblos' of the title is a small Greek island. The parentheses mean that the narrator, a young American visiting Diblos, plans to think of another name for the place when he publishes the novel for which he is making notes, but he doesn't; he doesn't finish the novel, and instead of it, we are given the notebooks just as they are, with their parentheses, crossed-out words, false starts, and so on. The chief male character of the novel, the narrator's half-brother, is called Orson, Orestes, or O. The chief female character is a Greek lady named (Dora). Their story is told to us on two levels: first as the narrator records his meditations on the 'real' events and characters, and second as he develops this material for his novel. One section of some thirty pages is a 'fair copy' of a fully developed piece of narrative.
Review, 1623 words
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