Marian Sia and Santiago Sia
The Fountain Arethuse
Sussex, UK: The Book Guild, 1997. Pp. 292. UK £15.95.
Reviewed by Piet Defraeye

The myth of Arethuse has been the subject of many literary projects (Milton, Shelley, Swinburne, Benoit, etc.). The contrast between Arethuse’s desire for purity and the grime of life and desire is at the center of most of these dealings. In the story, Arethuse, one of Diana’s nymphs, while bathing in a spring, finds her pursuit of purification disturbed by the concupiscent assault of the river god Alpheus. Her protectress, Diana, rescues her temporarily by allowing her to disappear into a spring, from which she sloshes happily into the mighty arms of the Alpheus river. No such symbiosis takes place in Marian and Santiago Sia’s latest take on the myth in their fiction debut The Fountain Arethuse. The novel desperately tries to situate itself-tongue in cheek-between the grand tradition of mythology and the popular genre of academic fiction à la David Lodge or Tom Sharpe. However, Lodge or Sharpe it is not!

The story, mostly located on university campuses both in North America and in Europe, features Richard Gutierrez, a neurotic assistant professor at a California college, who is on sabbatical leave in the Belgian university town of Louvain. He has been awarded a research grant to finish his manuscript on what keeps being called “the problem of evil,” though we never find out what he really means by that. Needless to say, his treatise never gets written. Richard’s more immediate and, as it turns out, desperate concern is not so much to discover the answers to his philosophical questions but rather to fulfill his department’s tenure requirements.

The focus of the book swings back and forth between this irritating pseudo-philosopher and a potentially more interesting Irish scholar of literature, Aisling O’Shea, who has had some very bad luck in her life and, predictably, fulfills the role of catalyst for the forlorn American academic. She is never given any chance by the narrator because of the constant focus on her six-year-old hyperactive son, Philip, who is bestowed the consciousness of a sixty-year-old man. Aisling’s attention also gets absorbed by her mother’s visit, the only potentially humorous character in the book. A few more odd minds supplement the academic landscape: a Philippine liberation theologist, an English theology lecturer who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and a Polish philosopher who is dealing with the fall-out of the Nazi camps-each contributing to the Socratic debates that are meant to enliven the sparse narrative.

Their paths cross, quite literally, at the Fons Sapientiae-the Learned Fons, a statue of a young man engrossed in a book while he holds up a tumbler which pours water onto his head. I remember it from my student days, as a landmark in the center of Louvain. The fountain was a popular site for student pranks, and a common interpretation of the artwork explained the liquid as representative of the amount of alcohol the average student in Louvain pours into his system. I remember hearing about wretched student bacchanalia scheduled at regular intervals in the plentiful beer rooms of the brewery town.

In Marian and Santiago Sia’s book, the fountain is the immediate cause for endless comments and questions on contrasting academic ideologies and dispositions: is the Fons’s conspicuous book a genuine source of knowledge to understand and engage with the world or is it a protective shield that comfortably alienates the scholar from an incomprehensible universe?

The answer to the question, if the book offers one, seems to be that The Fountain Arethuse itself is the way out of the conundrum. Instead of writing his academic treatise, Richard decides to write a novel about his stay in Louvain. The cyclical structure thus created (analogous to the endless cycle of the fountain) is supposed to be a clever surprise, but the cheekiness does not work. The problem is obviously situated in the position of the narrator. As the story abruptly switches back and forth between different characters and storylines, we experience a duplicitous kind of writing of a husband-and-wife team whose routine has become too predictable and lacks subtlety. Obviously, both authors-American scholars-have done the European tour of Louvain and Dublin. The few interesting passages in the novel are those that evoke a real sense of place, though they need to edit their work more carefully. The authors try to be cute by inserting lots of local lingo, but obviously don’t know Dutch. “Olde Markt” (117, 203) and “Sint Peters” (54) are surely not on the city map, “Scherbeek” (98) is another strange fabrication, and “Vlaanderen” (58) is not a language but the name of a region, and these are just a few examples. More disturbing, however, are the many instances of plain bad writing, and any good editor would have insisted on a number of cuts. After more than two hundred pages of pointing out how different life is in Louvain, we are presented with the following insight: “[Richard] always felt out of place here because all the discussion was in Dutch. Which was perfectly understandable, given the fact that he was in a Dutch-speaking university” (235).

At one point in the novel, Aisling’s son Philip badly needs to pee, and he finds no better solution than to climb onto the statue (not a sinecure for a six year old) and to let go on the head of the bronze student, in full view of his audience. It might well have been the reader’s revenge on an overextended motif, a rare moment of poetic justice.