Starch-free protest

Cass, her best friend from middle school, has hung around, married a hardworking farmer, and gradually fallen into taking care of Yumi's parents. Now that their medical needs are so involved, though, she expects Yumi to shoulder that familial duty herself. But it's clear that Yumi has no aptitude for geriatric care. Or child care. Or even self-care. After a series of miscarriages, Cass has to swallow her resentment toward this old friend who treats her own kids so casually. The battle of love and candor between these two women is just one of many superbly drawn relationships in this novel.

Yumi's reckless life is a testament to the lingering effects of shattered affection. Having nursed her hatred for her father so long, it's not easy to nurse him. At first, they both see what they're convinced they'll see: a licentious woman determined to flaunt her offensive lifestyle and a Christian control freak full of condemnation.

Very gradually, though, Yumi is amazed to discover that her father has developed into someone far more complex. As potato farming fell by the wayside during her absence, her parents grew more and more involved in specialty seeds, running a mail-order business dedicated to preserving rare and antique plants amid the march of monoculture.

Just when Yumi can't imagine how she'll cope with her parents' medical needs (described here in graphic detail), a band of ecohippies arrives to worship her father. Calling themselves The Seeds of Resistance, this weird family of Internet-savvy Luddites has been drawn to Liberty Falls by her father's newsletter, a mixture of homespun wisdom, rants against genetic engineering, and quotations from the Bible. Rallying from his deathbed, he welcomes this strange crew with open arms. While Yumi falls back into old self-destructive habits, the Merry Green Pranksters and her Old Testament father plot to save the world.

Ozeki handles all this with a winning mixture of wit and tenderness. It's a jungle of a plot, a riot of literary species, sown with strains of deadly satire and heartrending tragedy - winding around kitchen table discussions about family duty and through the international debate on genetically modified food. She's as good with the broad comedy of wacky political protests as she is with the terrifying ramifications of genetic manipulation. She can skewer the industry's PR flaks in one chapter and serve as the midwife for long-deferred affection in the next. And she tends a thicket of metaphors about gardening, seeds, and biodiversity, describing the promiscuity of plants with as much frankness as the promiscuity of her characters.

But even after growing all over creation, Ozeki returns to her roots: the love between parents and children, a relationship beyond the sight of microscopes, more complex than any double helix, never susceptible to engineering, but always in need of careful cultivation like this.

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

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