The old man and The Sea: Banville photo: Jerry Bauer The Sea By John Banville Knopf, 195 pp., $23 more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

With the gong for The Sea, the judges simply refitted the Booker as a career achievement award, as when they gave it to Kingsley Amis for The Old Devils or Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman. Here Banville is repeating himself, most conspicuously by repeating himself—the Irishman's most recent run of novels has become perplexingly reiterative. The Sea's narrator, Max Morden, is a familiar permutation of earlier Banville protagonists found in The Untouchable, Eclipse, and Shroud: An aged, misanthropic art historian given to grandiloquent self-examination and cosmic fatalism, Max returns to the seaside site of a childhood holiday to disinter memories of both his recently deceased wife, Anna, and the wealthy family, the Graces, who so fascinated him one pivotal summer vacation. His sexual awakening—stirred by an erotic fixation on Mrs. Grace and, later, her moody daughter, Chloe—spins a strange double helix in the older man's mind with Anna's death and his own ongoing trudge to the grave.

Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters, whose fierce powers of observation and description are rendered poignantly meaningless by failings of moral temperament, but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody. Where your garden variety depressive would see a rainy night playing accidental matchmaker to his mood, our Max will muse, "[I]t was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving." He can think the phrase "the ovine unsurprisedness at my perfidy." Brandishing Roget's apotropaic caduceus, Banville's prose is flocculent and positively crepitant with memory's torsions, but the strangury of obscure vocabulary tends to embalm The Sea in a hebetudinous catafalque. (Is cracaleured even a word?) But let us rationalize: Kazuo Ishiguro won the Booker in '89, Zadie Smith is only 30, and Banville's masterpiece, The Untouchable, is available at a bookstore near you.