'Divisadero': Where narrative splinters

There's more poetry than plot in the latest from Michael Ondaatje, the author of 'The English Patient.'

By Yvonne Zipp

from the June 12, 2007 edition

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Take a piece of paper, fold it over several times, crumple it a little, then take a pair of scissors to it. (Don't be afraid to get messy.) Now glue the whole thing into a three-dimensional object. Throughout his novels, Michael Ondaatje has taken a similar approach to linear storytelling, to great acclaim.

"The English Patient," for which he won the Booker Prize, jumped back and forth among four protagonists living in an Italian villa near the end of World War II, with discussions of mapmaking, condensed milk sandwiches, and Herodotus interspersed throughout. (Oh, and unlike in the movie, the English patient isn't even the main character.)

His most recent novel, "Anil's Ghost," took what could have been a mystery (why was a corpse buried twice?), and sliced and diced it into a searing, morally outraged tale of Sri Lanka's civil war. By the end, the titular character is beside the point.

Ondaatje's newest novel, Divisadero takes structural experimentation even further and is even more careless of its characters. In it, the story of a California farm boy-turned-gambler, the two sisters who love him, and the violence that separates them is juxtaposed with the tale of a writer born in the 19th century in rural France.

The effect of reading it is like watching a chef on a cooking show who prepares ingredients for a chilled golden beet soup with cucumbers – and then reaches into the oven, and pulls out a cassoulet. It looks delicious, but you have no idea where it came from.

The novel opens on a farm in California in the 1970s, where three children are being raised by an emotionally distant widower. Anna and Claire are the same age; Claire was adopted as an infant after her mother died. Coop, their older "brother," is a foundling taken in after the boy's family was murdered. When the girls are 16, their dad catches Coop and Anna having sex and beats the boy nearly to death. Anna runs away (as, obviously, does Coop).

Then Ondaatje fast-forwards 15 years. Claire works for a public defender; Coop becomes a card sharp and falls into the plot of a B movie (complete with thugs and a gorgeous blond heroin addict). Eventually, Claire finds Coop again. Meanwhile, Anna is a scholar living in France to research a forgotten writer.

"The three of them, [Claire] had always believed, made up a three-paneled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the other," Claire thinks much later on in life. "Those screens made more sense to her than single-framed paintings from the West that existed without context." Ondaatje is going for a similar effect, but in "Divisadero," he pulls a literary fast one that may alienate some of his less ardent fans.

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