Not Like That Book by Nabokov: 'Scores' Less of a Draw, More a Loss

Painting by numbers is not particularly taxing. The canvas comes prepainted, and a neat if unimaginative work is guaranteed. Nicholas Delbanco '63 has made literature by the numbers with his new book Old Scores. The prefab plot of star-crossed love between teacher and student serves as his canvas, but a serious mixup occurrs with the paint. Large sections of the completed work remain blank, and the final result is not a thing of beauty. Delbanco has rehashed an old tale with little style and less coherence.

The plot is straightforward. Professor Paul Ballard and his student Beth Sieverdsen have an affair, but a tragic accident separates the two for more than two decades. Unbeknownst to Ballard, Beth bears the couple's daughter and gives her up for adoption. Through this daughter, Ballard and Beth are eventually reunited.

Good writers have made great literature out of simpler stories than this, but they have done so by creating nuanced characters and by sensitively describing complex emotions. Old Scores instead offers one-dimensional characters whose actions seem logical only in Delbanco's brain. Delbanco's underdeveloped characters and general lack of clarity make many parts of the story utterly baffling.

The grand passion between Ballard and Beth scarcely seems strong enough to last a semester, let alone 25 years. When the couple meets, Beth is a bored and beautiful undergraduate at a small Vermont college; Ballard is her instructor in a vague brand of philosophy. Beth fires double entendre after wildly provocative double entendre at the defenseless Ballard, her devoted tutor. The two rather quickly become lovers--but in the physical, not emotional, sense of the word. Delbanco incorrectly assumes a few lurid encounters between Ballard and Beth are sufficient demonstration of their timeless love. The tenuous emotional bond between the two lovers relies on little more than sex and arch conversations; it is scarcely strong enough to survive a strong shock.

When Ballard is severely injured in a hit-and-run accident quite early in the book, his romance with Beth is obviously doomed. Delbanco faithfully lists Ballard's injuries, yet writes absolutely nothing about his reaction to the accident or his recovery from the accident. One day Ballard is nearly dead, several pages later he seems quite well. Still later Delbanco dismisses 15 years of Ballard's life in two paragraphs and then mentions that Ballard has only now nearly finished working through the various stages of grief that follow a loss.

This lack of precision is maddening, especially where emotions are concerned. "Renouncing her calmly, [Ballard] sent [Beth] away," Delbanco notes when, after the accident, Ballard distances himself emotionally from Beth. No other explanation for his sudden termination of the affair is given. Equally inexplicably, it is shortly after the accident that Beth discovers she's pregnant and chooses not to tell Ballard but to give the baby up for adoption. Delbanco explains that Beth "was twenty-one, an adult...[who was] in control of things and could make up her own mind."

Delbanco's underwhelming explication is by no means limited to his protagonists: a certain sense of abruptness pervades Old Scores. The frequent, dramatic changes are never foreshadowed and are rarely discussed for more than a sentence. Beth suddenly gets married; years later her husband suddenly announces he is gay; Sally suddenly demands biographical information from her biological mother Beth.

These unconvincing and relatively unimportant events, fleetingly described, contribute to a vague fuzziness that engulfs the book by the last few chapters. When Delbanco relates the central events that lead to the book's close, the fuzziness degenerates into a sense of sheer bewilderment. Even Delbanco, one feels, no longer understands his characters.

An elegant style could have salvaged even this book, but Delbanco's prose comes up short. Delbanco seems unsure how best to tell his story, so he tells it all ways. Old Scores is a pastiche of almost every type of novel imaginable. Various passages belong to college novels, bodice-rippers, epistolary novels and memoirs.

Sometimes Delbanco seems almost to have written drama or stand-up comedy--many of his phrases would sound droll if read aloud in a performance. Delbanco, a colleague of Ballard's, writes, had had a marriage that "had gone on the rocks because of the rocks in his glass. The ones that he covered with Scotch."

Certainly Delbanco is conscious of the mechanics of his prose--quite literally, in fact. Ballard twice upbraids other characters for improper use of gerunds. Like Ballard, Delbanco has an ear for "pretty mots all in a row," and obviously takes care to produce affecting sentences. Unfortunately, his sometimes clever phrases usually detract from the overall quality of the work. Entire paragraphs are sometimes included just for the sake of one pun. Some sentences read like Delbanco took a thesaurus and looked up a longer synonym for any word under six letters.

Those thesaurus-enhanced sentences scarcely sound pretentious when compared to Delbanco's generous use of allusion. References to virtually everything abound--"Leave It To Beaver," imaginary numbers and most classical composers are just a few of the staggering number of items mentioned. Delbanco likes allusions in English, but he loves them in foreign languages. Most European tongues are represented in Old Scores, had the book been any longer Delbanco would have had to use some non-Western quotes for variety. Rather than adding to the texture of the book, they merely provide a superficial veneer of erudition.

In the book's press notes, Andrea Barrett, whose National Book Award-winning collection of short stories Ship Fever is good enough that she should have known better, compares Old Scores to the famous story of the ill-fated lovers Abelard and Heloise. The parallel between the two stories is obvious--both are tales of ill-fated love affairs between teacher and student--but the comparison is specious. The passion between Abelard and Heloise has inspired great literature and art for eight centuries, but the passion between Beth Sieverdsen and Paul Ballard is just a rip-off of their love; it has produced only the disappointing Old Scores.