Divisadero [Hardcover]

Imagine being Michael Ondaatje surveying the world. It seems he can be almost anywhere and that’s his perspective, a perspective he shares with his readers. When I knew Michael best, southeastern Ontario translated through his precise and startling images into authenticity on the page that was especially affirming to those of us whose lives converged in that region with his own. By then, though, he had written as a virtual Australian and mythopoeic American and would go on to write about New Orleans, Italy, North Africa, Sri Lanka, and Toronto as if from separate lifetimes of memory. Like the chameleon, or more like the octopus that changes not only its colour but the texture of its flesh, he is where he is. That is his genius; but the corollary to being home everywhere is being home nowhere at all and there is something about this that is unbearably lonely. Loneliness comes across in his writing not through character or plot or poetic conceit but through place as an intrinsic dimension of the human condition. We feel lonely reading Michael Ondaatje. It is an unsettling experience, being lonely among words of such exacting beauty.
His newest novel, Divisadero, lets you know where you are when it opens by the sound of the breeze in a tree: northern California. Circling around like a raptor amused by his prey, he slowly closes in on a particular time, the 1970s, and on an improbable family-twin sisters who are unrelated, a brother who is not a brother, and an unknowable father. This is Ondaatje country, where the strange is inevitable and the everyday is strange. Then just when the reader feels the landscape at a gut level, through Ondaatje’s trademark rendering of exquisitely detailed violence, the world shifts. Like Alice, we are tumbled into an alternate reality where playing-cards rule. For a while, poker tables of Nevada displace the smell of horses and cedars. There is nothing of nature-even human nature is pared to the bone-as card mechanics deal grimly from the middle of the deck. And yet the words are crisply evocative-one hesitates to say images, for Ondaatje is a master ‘mechanic’ of evocative diction-and briefly his narrative replaces one authenticity with another.
But then comes Europe and his knack for defining place falters, perhaps because the details are given no context, like objects in a William Carlos Williams poem (and, in fact, in this segment Ondaatje playfully offers an empty wheelbarrow going nowhere). A disconcertingly vapid locale in south-central France hosts an affair in which passion, intimacy, and affection seem curiously at odds with each other. One of the twins, Anna, still traumatized by the convergence of sex and violence in her California childhood, is researching a dead writer, while her sister, Claire, riding horses back in the Sierras, also continues to suffer from the same event in her own separate world. Anna becomes involved with a brooding and vaguely exotic counterhero. In characteristic Ondaatje fashion, the lovers share emotions but not feelings. Haunted by their own ghosts, secretive with their own secrets, they never become real to each other. The absence of empathy is contagious. From outside the text, they seem interesting as perhaps mirrors of common insecurities, but like mirrors they are intrinsically empty themselves.
Stories strangely commingle. There seems to be no effort to orchestrate the fragments. Anna and Claire submerge or subvert identities, merge and exchange who they are with no particular urgency. Coop, their quasi-brother, unrelated to either, after becoming Anna’s first lover is beaten terribly by their father, and is later beaten senseless, literally; his identity is beaten right out of him. Anna’s quasi-Romany lover reveals little of himself, but his story connects him to Lucien Segura, the writer in whose rambling house she is now living, and whom she is researching. And of course there is a thief; there is always a thief, Ondaatje’s preferred persona for the writer as artist, just as the researcher stands for the artist as journeyman in thrall with the past. We are told back-stories that lead nowhere and given brief gnomic episodes that shrug off any attempt at thematic or lyric relevance. Eventually, the narrative abandons the present and slips into a past in which lovers pose as siblings and literary allusions provide details more real than surroundings.
A.S. Byatt in Possession explores the resonant distances between a dead writer and a living one. Carol Shields did the same, as have others. It is a fertile conceit. Conversations between the past and the present, between sensibilities already, if enigmatically, exposed and those still unexplored promise unexpected turns of plot or revelation. But is it enough to cast a few well-turned lines across the abyss, then swing over them into the past and leave the frame story behind? Maybe it works and I just don’t get it. No critic or reviewer wants to be the one to dismiss The Double Hook or Moby Dick.
Divisadero presents as a poem, a dramatic monologue. The voice holding it all together is solemn, somewhat pontifical, and exceptionally self-assured. When Ondaatje’s usually unerring sense of place falters in France, the voice intones place names as if they were geographical features. When coincidence in characters’ lives seems improbable, a literary self-consciousness reminds us this is fiction, not life. When identities merge or converge, when every relationship is an analogue, when lives become allusions and characters hover between central casting and Great Books origins, the voice of the poet, who is usually unseen, makes it all the expression of a singular vision
Quotation marks are for the most part abjured. Each character, dressed in images connecting to a narrative thread, speaks in a voice common to all and largely inseparable from the text as a whole. Sometimes the voice suggests a discursive authorial presence, sometimes it seems a disguise. The following is from a single short passage: “How we are almost nothing.” (That is the entire sentence, the opening of a paragraph.) “We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe . . . ” (This is declared without irony). “Years later, if he had been able to look back . . . ” (An indeterminate future is both offered and withheld.) Sometimes this voice adds wisdom, or references to popular culture, or enigmatic asides, or a soulful aura of loneliness, a hurt urgency, that without being understood is genuinely moving.
Who thinks this: “All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other . . . Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said . . . We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” We all do. The sentiment is familiar, contemporary, tentatively poststructural. It could be Anna or Claire or Coop or the old writer, Segura, or Rafael, Anna’s Johnny Depp-like lover. Or Michael Ondaatje, or the reader. What we have here is conservative anarchy, where the isolated psyche and theories of being converge. Vintage Ondaatje: the sentiments carefully radical, their expression radically precise.
This novel is filled with the lovely gems of elusive meaning that the reader expects from Ondaatje. Unlike so many poet-novelists in Canada, from Atwood to Bowering to Kroetsch to Urquhart, he does not pursue the genres as separate practices. His poetry has a strong narrative quality, while his fiction plays with words and images, echo, and allusion, inspired as much by jazz as the Great Tradition. Sometimes, as in Coming Through Slaughter, it is hard to separate poetry from prose, or one genre of prose from another, and the text powerfully rejects the need or desire to do so. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, poetry prevails; in The English Patient, it resonates beneath the surface, rising occasionally through fissures in the narrative flow to startle with beauty, haunt with disturbing gestures of sensitivity.
Often, in his writing, Ondaatje turns a phrase to make of the obscure an image so undeniable, the language shudders. He is an alchemist of sorts, making the awkward just right, the empty fulfilling. Yet, in Divisadero, named with thematic efficiency for a street in San Francisco, there are too many instances where obscurity confounds, and the words remain words. Nothing could be better than, “Monsieur Q surveyed the garden and gathered branches and clarified the flower beds.” Clarified the flower beds! Or: “Coop watches Lina walk over and mount her horse, supple as a scarf . . .” Or: “He felt the man could have folded her into some part of his clothing and made her disappear.” But there is something tired about: “. . . she works in archives and discovers every past but her own,” and “ . . . anything peaceful has a troubled past.” The conflation of the vague and the obvious seems indulgent: “ . . . precise as a utility in the way he moved,” or “ . . . turning with an un-bloodlike intelligence,” or “It wasn’t the beauty, it was the variousness,” or “Just for the epaulette of such a name.” Ondaatje’s readers expect more.
Michael Ondaatje will win awards for this novel. As the late Tom Marshall, himself a poet, novelist, and critic, used to say with expansive generosity: people like giving Michael awards. Sometimes the decision to do so may waver, but prevailing cultural currents and the winds of taste and judgement often converge, even if it means he shares the prize with his peers. In 2000 his novel, Anil’s Ghost, shared the Giller prize with David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among the Children; in 1992 The English Patient shared the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger; in 1970 The Collected Works of Billy the Kid shared the Governor General’s Award with four works by bpNichol, including The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid; in 1967 he shared the E.J. Pratt Award with Wayne Clifford. It is difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between multiplication and division. My two children I love no less than if I had one, but, had I two lovers, I doubt I could love either with all my heart. Ondaatje collects prizes, and like lovers they complement his desire. It’s hard to know what to make of this (a phenomenon not wholly without precedent: Alden Nowlan and Eli Mandel shared the GG in ’67). Perhaps nothing at all.
John Moss (Books in Canada)

Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient, but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy. (June)
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