Books in Brief: The Lost Traveler’s Dream

The Lost Traveler’s Dream, by Kelly Cherry (Harcourt Brace, 231 pp., $13.95)

This is a novel that could serve as a model for “serious” modern novelists. It has all the elements—loneliness, alienation, sex, women’s issues—interwoven with references to the nature of God and reality. Its structure, a Chinese puzzle, a box-within-a-box-within-a-box affair, is intended to suggest, one must suppose, the fragility of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The Lost Traveler’s Dream begins with the fairly straightforward story of Kate Allen, who yearns for a warm and loving relationship with a man but seems forever doomed to failure. Then the second box is opened upon would-be poet Lindy in Amsterdam, where a traumatic love affair with a man who wants to humiliate her by watching her make love to one of his ex-girlfriends seems to propel her into a new role as a photographer, a role in which we later meet her in New York. Then another box is opened, and it contains Nan, who is a novelist, who has created Kate, who has created Lindy, who has . . . But here the cycle of creation stops—or does it? Characters are introduced, along with occasional commentary from creator/writer Nan to allow the reader to be aware that these characters are indeed a creation of the writer’s imagination. The reader is permitted to believe that he has at last come to the end of the puzzle. He is not allowed to entertain this illusion for long, however, as the Nan-Kate-Lindy trinity begins to spin out another story with another cast of characters. This story has no beginning or ending by traditional standards, and the reader is left to puzzle over the real, as opposed to the fictional, characters. Professor Cherry, who is also a poet, critic, essayist, and professor of English and permanent Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, has handled the layered-reality device deftly. Lawrence Durrell used this same device effectively in his Avignon quintet, but where Durrell’s novels are permeated with inversion and hints of sexual mysteries in exotic settings, Professor Cherry deals with the blander realities of contemporary life, softened by a touch of the modern, transitional South. She is a talented writer, whose poetic abilities are illustrated by her frequently lyrical imagery. It makes one wish she would move beyond the artifices of The Lost Traveler’s Dream and tap the universal themes of life and death, love and hate, that belong to no place or time and require no complicated structure to enhance their mystery.

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Norma B. Williamson

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The Lost Traveler’s Dream, by Kelly Cherry (Harcourt Brace, 231 pp., $13.95)

This is a novel that could serve as a model for “serious” modern novelists. It has all the elements—loneliness, alienation, sex, women’s issues—interwoven with references to the nature of God and reality. Its structure, a Chinese puzzle, a box-within-a-box-within-a-box affair, is intended to suggest, one must suppose, the fragility of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The Lost Traveler’s Dream begins with the fairly straightforward story of Kate Allen, who yearns for a warm and loving relationship with a man but seems forever doomed to failure. Then the second box is opened upon would-be poet Lindy in Amsterdam, where a traumatic love affair with a man who wants to humiliate her by watching her make love to one of his ex-girlfriends seems to propel her into a new role as a photographer, a role in which we later meet her in New York. Then another box is opened, and it contains Nan, who is a novelist, who has created Kate, who has created Lindy, who has . . . But here the cycle of creation stops—or does it? Characters are introduced, along with occasional commentary from creator/writer Nan to allow the reader to be aware that these characters are indeed a creation of the writer’s imagination. The reader is permitted to believe that he has at last come to the end of the puzzle. He is not allowed to entertain this illusion for long, however, as the Nan-Kate-Lindy trinity begins to spin out another story with another cast of characters. This story has no beginning or ending by traditional standards, and the reader is left to puzzle over the real, as opposed to the fictional, characters. Professor Cherry, who is also a poet, critic, essayist, and professor of English and permanent Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, has handled the layered-reality device deftly. Lawrence Durrell used this same device effectively in his Avignon quintet, but where Durrell’s novels are permeated with inversion and hints of sexual mysteries in exotic settings, Professor Cherry deals with the blander realities of contemporary life, softened by a touch of the modern, transitional South. She is a talented writer, whose poetic abilities are illustrated by her frequently lyrical imagery. It makes one wish she would move beyond the artifices of The Lost Traveler’s Dream and tap the universal themes of life and death, love and hate, that belong to no place or time and require no complicated structure to enhance their mystery.