Micheline Aharonian Marcom's "Draining the Sea" goes hopelessly adrift

Micheline Aharonian Marcom has published two acclaimed novels, "Three Apples Fell from Heaven" and "The Daydreaming Boy." Both focused on the 1915-1917 Armenian genocide. Born in Saudi Arabia to an American father and Armenian-Lebanese mother, Marcom moved with her family to the United States in 1968, but she never forgot her painful heritage. Now she turns in her writing to an American setting: Los Angeles, where she grew up.

Sadly, "Draining the Sea" (Riverhead, 335 pp., $26.95), which completes her trilogy about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath, is an impossibly convoluted, repetitious and confusing stream-of-consciousness novel.

Its narrator, for instance. Who is he? A "fat white lonely American ("half-Armenian") boy." Several times, he claims he was married. His son died in utero, and after the fetus was removed, the narrator's wife divorced him. Or did she? Was there a wife and baby?

"This too could be a fiction: the wife the green armchair the house on Hollyline Av," he claims. "Reader, how will you decide?"

At night, the nameless narrator drives Los Angeles' freeways collecting dead dogs, which he buries in his garden. He is writing an essay, apparently, to someone named Marta, a Guatemalan prostitute who was tortured and murdered. Was the narrator a soldier? Did he love and/or kill her? Is he making her up? She is his confessor, someone he desires sexually. Someone whose fate during the United States' 1982-83 incursions he can't stop imagining. Or is he actually remembering?

"What," he wonders, "am I then? corpse-collector; essayist; motorist ... a once-husband and a half-father; half-Armenian; and a businessman on most Gregorian calendar days, a buyer on all the days, and I have not liked my meals in courses, but piled on my plate, and meat at night and for lunch every afternoon — the business and the leisure, the Shows and the shirts made of fine cottons and wools: I have been stricken; I have been stiff and my bones, as if made of wood in the mornings before I travel the highways to the office, over the hills of Santa Monica and down the canyon, which is the 405, to work; on the days when there is no business, no TO DO's, no wife or meeting or dinners! or games: then I am stricken, then I am wooden and quiet, alone in my green and padded armchair in the San Fernando Valley."

Well, what to make of Marcom's intensely felt, utterly bewildering work?

To complete this assignment, I divided the number of pages in the book by the number of days until deadline, then got up each day dreading the task of making sense of the novel. I'm not a poet, and thought the fault was mine, that such previously highly praised poetic prose was over my head.

But I kept returning to a long-ago day at Port Townsend's Centrum summer program, when I visited a fiction-writing class that Raymond Carver led. One story was so compressed, so opaque, that Carver's usual gentle approach seemed uncharacteristically harsh. He told the writer, "You're making this too hard."

Day by day, as I slogged through my appointed pages, I became increasingly frustrated. How could Marcom indulge herself with such language? She had received several of the writing world's juiciest plums — a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers' Award — yet this book circled on and on and on ... to what purpose? How had her poor editor, copy editor and proofreader ever managed? And readers, not paid to cope with this narrator's fixations on sex, masturbation, defecation, urination, torture, war ... what would hold them?

I recalled another piece of writing: Carolyn Forché's prose poem, "The Colonel," about atrocities in El Salvador. In a spare couple of hundred words, vivid horrors balanced pointed understatements. Forché had a clear agenda, too, but her message was far too important to obscure. Unlike Forché, Marcom has made this too hard.