Making a Mess
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Making aMess By Brooke Allen WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between literature and romance fiction? It’s easy enough to place honest practitioners of the latter art, like Georgette Heyer...
...Later we revisit Coop...
...He has come a cropper with some sinister born-again Christian gamblers, who beat him up so badly that he suffers from amnesia if not permanent brain damage...
...Why doesn’t she simply take him to a hospital...
...Anna and Claire are being brought up as twins, though Claire is really adopted...
...People in Ondaatje novels are always obscurely “wounded...
...It’s easy enough to place honest practitioners of the latter art, like Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland, on one side of the divide, but the categories get murkier when it comes to writers with literary pretensions...
...Coop settles in Tahoe, where he becomes a professional gambler...
...many times [Rafael] has wished to be a bird in flight over the landscape...
...How this penniless 16-year-old found her way to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College to study French literature is a mystery Ondaatje never bothers to explain...
...Readers who secretly relish romance lit but consider themselves too educated to indulge in it will love this sort of stuff...
...His tough fingers would tug the heart out of his guitar...
...A third child, a nextdoor neighbor named Coop who is four years the girls’ senior, is taken in when his family is murdered...
...How is she able to quit her job, and where do they get money in the meantime...
...Here are a couple of examples of the prose that clots Divisadero: “Anna had met no one like him...
...She fetches up at the idyllic village of Dému in the Gers, living in a manoir that once belonged to the French writer Lucien Segura and translating his journals...
...Whenever there is a choice between a straightforward statement and a convoluted pretentious one, he invariably chooses the latter: “He read as if speaking in tongues, with such adult knowledge he was like someone wise who had been wounded in a distant battle or by a passion...
...His novels jump backward and forward at will, with no regard for the reader and very little for the internal needs of the stories themselves...
...As for the structure happening as the story unravels, that is all well and good as long as the writer goes back later to polish it up and to impose some order on the various tangled threads of his tale, but Ondaatje usually fails to do so...
...We then follow the various characters in their meandering progress...
...What you experience in the high air is the petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees, somewhat like the music Anna has played for him in the kitchen, with only the essential notes of life reaching you through that distance of air...
...Not character, either...
...He drops highbrow names freely, to no particular purpose...
...casinos are such naturally unromantic spots that Ondaatje has been constrained simply to present them realistically, and in doing so shows he can write well when he chooses...
...Rafael proves to be not only a noble savage but a handy metrosexual with a knack for whipping up aromatic stews and salads...
...Here is more on his strong, silent hero: “A song of endless searching sung by this man who until then had seldom revealed himself...
...I always thought Michael Ondaatje’s high-lit hit, The English Patient (1992)—with its fine romantic sheen, inexplicably tortured characters, wild improbability, utter selfimportance, and overheated lyricism—was simply a gussied-up romance novel...
...But atmosphere is created through a series of concrete images, while his descriptive prose is more like a miasmic vapor...
...Like The English Patient, it is set in wildly scenic locations (the California mountains, quaint villages in the Gers region of southern France) so that one suspects Ondaatje of keeping an eye on the eventual movie deal...
...Growing up, Anna and Coop get it on...
...I work where art meets life in secret,” she says portentously...
...Ondaatje himself has given a rather disturbing description of his working method: “I don’t really begin a novel, or any kind of book, with any sure sense of what is happening or even what’s going to happen,” he said in a statement that will surprise none of his close readers...
...Rafael goes into long stories about his thief father and Gypsy mother and how they came together...
...What are sidebars and descants supposed to mean...
...Ondaatje does care about atmosphere...
...THE PLOT of Divisadero is complicated and diffuse, with plenty of scarcely connecting story lines...
...I tend not to know what the plot is or the story or even the theme...
...In Divisadero there are coy nods to Colette, Jean Genet, Lucian Freud, William Styron, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Vaughan, and “that marvel, Annie Dillard...
...Characteristically, Ondaatje says that “The structure happens as the story unravels, with each discovery, at each plateau, a sidebar or descant, whatever it is...
...What Are Ondaatje’sconcerns as a novelist...
...The vagueness and hyperbole, the gushing, undisciplined prose, and all the other sins of romance fiction are here in spades...
...For instance, when a young man calls a woman by the wrong name, the narrator tells us: “Gotraskhalana is a term in Sanskrit poetics for calling a loved one by a wrong name, and means, literally, ‘stumbling on the name.’ It’s a familiar occurrence in the Restoration-like fables of marital life and love affairs collected by the scholar Wendy Doniger...
...More mysteries...
...Soon she meets a dishy local, Rafael, who lives in a caravan in a nearby field...
...Though he would tell her of an earlier relationship that had silenced him completely, and how he had almost not emerged from that...
...There appeared to be no darkness in him...
...But Ondaatje has written messes before, and has always gotten away with it...
...Why the manoir is still empty many years after Segura’s death, and why Anna is allowed the run of it, are two more unsolved mysteries...
...Divisadero wanders all over the map with no destination in sight and none reached...
...He is her ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger,’ or perhaps she is his”—whatever that might mean...
...At one point I realized that for more than 20 pages I had been reading about Lucien while under the impression that he was Rafael...
...Does Ondaatje have anything specific in mind, or does he just like the sound of the words...
...Far from being the Godlike creator envisioned by Flaubert, this author functions more as a medium...
...The question is, does Ondaatje do all that cynically, or is he as goofy as his characters...
...There was nowhere for him to hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as though he were no longer on the stage...
...Although Ondaatje makes a feeble effort to impose unity on his plot strands by insisting that his characters’ lives are interwoven, in reality nothing except bare circumstance connects them...
...Sure enough, the book was soon made into a big-budget movie whose every frame looked as though it had been lifted directly from the pages of a glossy consumer magazine like Destinations...
...He is fond of philosophical interjections, wishing perhaps to pre-empt the critics by garnishing his text with a generous admixture of literary theory...
...the father discovers them and flies into a rage...
...These things come later for me...
...Anna, surprisingly, becomes a scholar...
...All the people in this book are psychologically interchangeable, and they are interchangeable with the narrator as well...
...All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love—seemingly the most natural of acts...
...Now he is coincidentally discovered by the long-lost Claire, and she whisks him away on an exhausting cross-country flight from his enemies...
...If that isn’t romance fiction, I don’t know what is...
...This is glaringly evident in the rambling Divisadero...
...The novel opens on a remote ranch in 1970s California...
...He was in fact coming out of that privacy for the first time with her...
...He is a link, too, back to Lucien Segura, whose life story we also hear...
...Not plot, clearly...
...In short, Divisadero is a mess...
...Maybe Ondaatje gets away with it through his habit of throwing up a smokescreen of pseudointellectualism...
...Coop heads for the hills and Anna runs away separately...
...Also true to the genre are The English Patient’ s luscious locations in the sands of Araby and under the Tuscan sun...
...The casino scenes are easily the best part of the book...
...Anil’s Ghost (2000), which dealt with a real subject—political violence in Ondaatje’s native Sri Lanka—was a little better, but his newest effort, Divisadero (Knopf, 273 pp., $25.00), sinks back into the gloopy mire of his most famous work...
...there was nothing in either character to differentiate them...
Vol. 90 • August 2007 • No. 3
