DIVISADERO

[June 13th, 2007] "Not knowing something essential makes you more involved," says somebody in Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited new novel, Divisadero (Knopf, 273 pages, $25). The line is a wink from the novelist himself, describing what it's like to navigate Ondaatje's elegant and compulsively elliptical narratives. There's always been an oddly erotic magnetism in the way this Canadian poet handles fiction, simultaneously directing and diverting focus from his tales' veiled centers. With an Ondaatje novel we never quite know what sort of story we're reading or, more precisely, whose (there are no rightful protagonists), but the author controls our attention with mystifying power.

In his earlier works, Coming Through Slaughter and The English Patient—but not so much in his last effort, Anil's Ghost—Ondaatje displayed a cinéaste's finesse for constructing novels from highly compressed, intensely vivid scenes arranged in unorthodox ways with breathtaking transitions between. And while those first novels borrow the tight components of cinema, they are beautifully expansive stories. By this description Divisadero is classic Ondaatje. The book begins in 1970s Northern California, exploring the relationships between a girl named Anna, her adopted sister Claire, and an orphaned neighbor boy called Coop, at a moment before the ties that bind the three will be severed forever. Years later, Coop has become a professional gambler in Tahoe, Anna finds herself in rural France, and Claire has drifted into legal work in San Francisco. Their scattered destinies take up most of the novel. The book's final third, however, diverges to an almost unsettling degree. The ostensible protagonists disappear completely. One minor character's history spools out into another's, and that one into two more strands. A reader could begin to wonder if Ondaatje's focus isn't a bit too diffuse. But then he lays a million-dollar sentence on us, and we're reminded why we read his books: not for plot, never for a cohesive chronicle, but rather for his supple poetry and observational magic. And his prose is at its most precariously beautiful here (does any other novelist ride the razor's edge quite as successfully?):

"There were evenings when Aria and Rafael stood on the dry night-grass with a hundred layers of stars above them. Uncountable. A million orchestras. The boy could scarcely store the delirious information. That journey south with his mother...broke his heart again and again with happiness. It was when he felt most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him—a tree's sigh or his mother's song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him."

As ever, Ondaatje avoids reducing the elusive poetry of his narrative to meager explanations at the close, instead achieving pure resonance. We exit Divisadero gripped by its glorious mysteries.