Complicated lives...

...Doubling down

A man remembering his parents at the beach maybe sixty years earlier: you expect something windswept, lyrical, pleasingly melancholy. What you get is the splayed banana skin, the mottled legs, the lard-colored ankles. Does Banville mean to be iconoclastic? Then what do you make of the final line, with the past “untarnished, gleaming, bright as that tin box”? Again, Banville is trying to show us how things are bewildering, double. Sentimentality, he told an interviewer, is “the absolute death of art.”