Albert Goldbarth's first novel, Pieces of Payne, is framed by a conversation between two friends in a bar getting sloshed. Reviewing the book puts one in the mind of explaining to a friend–one can anticipate the need for backpedaling, having forgotten certain basic information, organizing and reorganizing thoughts on a work that seems designed to defy these efforts. One feels a bit inebriated.
           It's a fine novel, amazing and virtuosic.
           But first, some specifications. Goldbarth has written dozens of books–poetry and essays–and anyone familiar with the latter knows he has a penchant for bringing disparate elements together in a way that is stunning and provocative. He has done so here, in a book the back cover labels Essay (scribbled out in red), "Memoir" (likewise wiped off), "Belles Lettres" (again) and finally, "Novel" (circled).
           He flags some of the intersections of these ideas with footnotes. The book is cordoned into halves, the "proper" first half, and the second, which contains the footnotes. These are not five-word phrases of exposition, but paragraphs–sometimes pages–of prose: anecdotes, historical miscellany–not much different from what populates the first half, though often shorter. In an introductory blurb, Goldbarth counsels the reader to choose whether to read these notes when their corresponding footnotes bob up, or as "one continuous block of prose called 'Notes'."
           Pieces of Payne is a deep and rich exploration of dualities, of lives it describes as "bifurcated." Eliza, divorced not so long ago, amidst other changes in her life, is about to make a big announcement, over cocktails, to Albert Goldbarth, a former literature instructor. She tells him a story he's heard before, about her father, Randolph Phillips, a surgeon who specializes in the treatment of breast cancer. The Ran-Man, as he's dubbed, learned after years at his career how to nurture his persona as a handsome and brilliant man at the hospital, while his "House Man" persona was, to Eliza, aloof and erratic.
           And thus we meet Lightning Boy and his sidekick Proty, which could morph into anything: "a leopard-bird from the swamps of Galaxy Seven, a vampire orchid." We learn, via footnote, the names of the daytime counterparts to comic book heroes Chameleon Boy, Braniac 5, Triplicate Girl, and a legion of others. We learn that Charles Dickens is said to have carried 13,143 characters around in his head, and that Columbus kept two logs of his voyages: the official one, and one with the bad news.
           The connection of that last fact to the story is that Eliza's Ran-Father kept two appointment books, one listing patients, business, and the other the get-togethers with various women he had affairs with before eventually being divorced by Eliza's mom.
           During this turbulence, adolescent Eliza discovered astronomy. A teacher gave her a book by the pioneering astronomer Cecilia Payne, and Eliza found a hero for life. Payne began her career doing tedious cataloguing of stars. "Gruntwork," Eliza tells Albert over drink two or three. "But I loved the idea! Lists! Of stars!" Eliza found stability in the study of the cosmos while her parents' marriage was spiralling miserably–when "the Shelly shit was hitting the Randolph fan big-time." As an adult, Eliza confides, "when I'm shopping at the Food-4-Less and the cashier lifts some product with a bar code?…I get a sweet feeling inside. It looks to me like the spectra lines for elements in the composition of stars that Payne was so extraordinarily devoted to."
           Eliza's life takes on a certain bifurcation. She doesn't wield two conflicting personas, but lives as one person with another woman's persona grafted on. While Dickens walked under the weight of thousands, Eliza carried Payne with her everywhere. "Payne had started out with an interest in botany," she tells Albert, "and so of course I'd made a little green plot in our yard. Payne married a Russian, I married a Russian: poor Jay never understood he was only being used for my copycat purposes. Not that I understood it either, not at the time."
           So many contemporary novels and stories place a light touch on theme–letting the action suggest it, and letting the reader do not just the deeper interpretation, but the mere identification of the significance of many events. Pieces of Payne is a welcome anomaly in its rich overt exploration of theme, in this case double-lives, reinvention, personas.
           Another of the many illustrations of this theme comes from a reading of Moby-Dick. Goldbarth refers to Ishmael and Queequeg as "strange scrambled-image brothers." He also employs Melville's opus to discuss the bifurcation of the very perception of events. "After all," he says, "from the point of view of the ocean, a ship going down is not a loss, but a returning." So, when Eliza left university professorship to teach high school astronomy, and left her husband Jay to begin a relationship with a woman, was she reinventing herself, or finding her true self for the first time? It could depend on whom you ask.
           Goldbarth's approach of spreading seemingly the entire world in front of the reader is charming and, frankly, impressive. Goldbarth is smarter than the average smart person, more knowledgeable, and in possession of a desire to embrace every nugget of fact, every fragment of culture, to pull the world to him. He sees, and of course, invites the reader to see, a life composed of separate particles of meaning waiting to be seen in conjunction by some keen eye. His exuberance is contagious.
           However, as Goldbarth asks us to notice the duality present throughout life, one could have a forked reaction to some elements of his novel. One could, it seems plausible, be perfectly fascinated by the sundry facts and anecdotes, and feel that she is indeed reading a book of essays, no matter what is circled on the dust jacket. It doesn't matter what you call a book, but novel readers will always like stories, and there is much less narrative in Payne than analysis. The developments in Eliza's life are given to us just as they are to Goldbarth the conversation partner–not rendered in flashback or bestowed with detail, drama. We don't learn much of anything about her husband, Jay, or her current lover, Carlota, or that much about her.
           Still, even though Goldbarth doesn't lavish a lot of detail on her, Eliza does flesh out well enough–endearing if not particularly original for a contemporary character who's a member of academia. She's neurotic and sharp-tongued and gleans some sympathy from me, a fairly impressive amount considering that her characterization is so slight.
           Some of the most interesting material is in the asides, the digressions, the histories. I'm not sure how much these things lend a feel of great importance to what Eliza has gone through and is going through. The connections can be found more than felt–Eliza's story and the horde of other material seem a bit separated, and the Eliza material a bit dwarfed. It's a novel that's self-conscious about what it is, and that lends the reader (or at least this one) to spend time on that issue as well, a less than ideal pursuit given all the things to notice most in a piece of fiction.
            But the novel opens up so many channels for pondering and exploring and mulling–it is intergalactic in its scope, and will give any curious reader something she'll be happy to carry around for a long time.