Bay of Arrows

Parini's ( The Last Station ) larky, clever novel follows unlikely and amusing parallel lives: those of Christopher ``Geno'' Genovese, a talented but frustrated and restless poet and professor of English at a small New England college, and no less than Christopher Columbus himself, feeling some of the same emotions 500 years before. Both are adventurers; both are self-confident men who contend with a certain amount of personal confusion. And each believes that a splendid destiny awaits him, if only he can clear a way to it. The plot of Columbus's effort is somewhat familiar; that of Geno's is invented, and makes the poet an accessible foil, eventually dispatching him to the very spot (the Bay of Arrows, in the Dominican Republic) where Columbus landed centuries earlier. Whimsical as the idea may sound, Parini draws on his adroit comic sense, broad human sympathies and mind for the details of history and domesticity to do right by it. Composed in chapters that alternate between the two main characters and their entourages, the novel homes in on present-day and distant ironies, brings Columbus down to earth, and even interjects poetry and a comic masque (featuring God, St. Peter, Noam Chomsky, Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus et al.) by way of insightful diversion. (Aug.)