Final Sale: Everything must go!

"But that's no reason for people to stop buying mine," Cipriano protests unreasonably. "Earthenware's earthenware, it's authentic, it's natural."

For most people interested in the small, disruptive effects of globalization and corporate monopoly, the dark comedy of "The Cave" will prove more illuminating than reams of economic analysis. Even Saramago's pinko reputation doesn't cast the rose-colored glare you might expect. His novel isn't a Marxist critique of consumerism so much as a heartfelt lament.

Naturally, Cipriano reacts badly to this loss of employment, the first setback his steady though tepid career has ever faced. He feels like "a cracked bowl which there is no point in clamping together." But the narrator is the first to admit that the old man "bears some of the blame for this himself" because he failed to anticipate the changing tastes of his customers and adopt the latest methods of manufacturing.

Encouraged by his daughter and the arrival of a stray dog (whose thoughts are marvelously transcribed for us), Cipriano decides he's not too old to learn new tricks after all. He throws himself into a mad week of learning and retooling to make ceramic dolls.

This hardly seems like a surefire scheme for economic revival. But when The Center places an order for 1,200 of his little mud people - in one week! - he confronts an entirely new problem for small-time manufacturers.

The Adam and Eve myth is clay in Saramago's crafty hands, the material for wise commentary about the nature of creation, labor, and artistic expression. Indeed, what's particularly remarkable about this novel is what beauty he can form from such ordinary matter.

In this tiny family, he manages to capture so much tenderness and tension, the perfectly realized dynamics of two generations with wholly different expectations. The frustration and respect between son-in-law and father-in-law develops with particular care. His narration is a fine dust that reveals the fingerprints of even the lightest emotional contact in the small moments of domestic life.

Ultimately, there's no effective resistance to The Center and the scrambling economic force it represents - except for the permanence of family relationships and little revolutionary acts of kindness.

This tender, allegorical story would be reason enough to read "The Cave," but what truly elevates it to something essential is Saramago's style; this fantastically agile, irrepressibly funny, sympathetic, cerebral, and sometimes even corny voice. Throughout, he interrupts his tale to discuss the process of storytelling, calling into question the conventions of fiction, mocking his characters' foibles even while cradling them in his affections. He lulls us into easy interpretations only so he can foil them later on.

This is a novel that seems prematurely aged with the luster of ancient legend, but it addresses a future we face.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section tocharlesr@csmonitor.com.

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