History: The Home Movie

This ``novel in verse'' from British poet Raine (Rich) traces in tercets the 20th-century history of his family in Oxford, England, and of Boris Pasternak's in Russia. The subject matter echoes that of historical fiction or family chronicles like War and Peace or Buddenbrooks, but Raine tells it in family album-sized snapshots, with the verse reminiscent of Auden and Betjeman. From this discrete, disconnected perspective, events are presented with uniform, monotonous diffidence-whether adolescent masturbation, a lecture on theosophy by Yeats or a menacing telephone call from Stalin (major events, like Pasternak's winning of the Nobel Prize, are avoided altogether). History's parallels and coincidences, including musical mothers and leg injuries in both families and variations on trials (from libel suits to Stalin's show trials), thread through chronologically arranged sections alongside recurring poetic images (for example, the moon or spiders) and literary allusions (Shakespeare in particular). Raine's unvarying poetic approach to characters and incidents, whether mundane or complex, eventually fails to amass the sustained density of a novel's narrative and mood, however, and his imagination succeeds in recreating life only in insular England, not in tragic Russia. First serial to the New Yorker; author tour. (Oct.)