COAST TO COAST.(Review)(Brief Article)

Frederic Raphael. Catbird, $22.95 (240p) ISBN 0-945774-42-7

"It's not a tragedy. It's not quite a comedy. My agent would not be surprised to discover that we're having difficulty placing it." It's also how late-middle-aged sit-corn writer Barnaby Pierce describes his fraught marriage, and the way that the prolific British writer Raphael vicariously names the hybrid genre of his own seriocomic antiromance. Told mainly through the snapping, sparring dialogue between Barnaby and his wife, Marion, as they travel from New York to California in a '67 Jag, the novel maps the course of their life together. In crisis, the two reveal and revenge each other's infidelities, …