Volume 48, Number 4 · March 8, 2001
Breakdown
By Gabriele Annan
Eclipse
by John Banville
Knopf, 212 pp., $23.00
The story of Eclipse follows a bare outline. Its first-person narrator is a world-famous Irish actor. One day—he is in his fifties—he finds himself unable to say his lines on stage and just manages to stagger off. He has felt a nervous collapse brewing for some time. The actor, Alexander Cleave (known as Alex), decides to retreat to the house where he was born and where his widowed mother took in lodgers. It is in a small provincial town, and his wife, Lydia, drives him there from their posh seaside house a few hours away, presumably just outside Dublin. They quarrel (they often do); she is miserable and disagreeable, and that afternoon she packs up and leaves. Later on in the story, she returns.
Review, 1928 words
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