Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Alfred A. Knopf, $25

Michael Ondaatje is best known for The English Patient -the Booker Prize winning novel that made an Oscar-winning leap to the big screen in 1996. I've never gotten around to reading it, even though several friends have told me that Anthony Minghella's film doesn't do justice to Ondaatje's lapidary prose or his complex psychological insights.

I did read In the Skin of the Lion, and passages from Anil's Ghost. In both cases Ondaatje's beautiful writing floored me to a point but ultimately left me cold. The recent publication of Divisadero made a big splash in the literary world, however, and I decided to give it a whirl.

Set over the course of about a century in locations such as Northern California and rural France, Divisadero is consistently engaging and - as we've come to expect from Ondaatje - meticulously crafted. The first half of the novel explores the vast repercussions of an illicit affair between a teenage girl named Anna and an older, orphaned young man named Cooper who works on Anna's father's farm. Anna and Cooper flee, separately, to reinvent themselves elsewhere, while Anna's adopted sister, Claire, maintains a connection with the father.

Ondaatje takes us on a tour of Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas, where Cooper becomes a master card shark. Anna's journey paves the way for the rather forced transition to the book's second half. She grows up to be a French literature scholar, and travels to a French hamlet to live in the home of a celebrated writer named Lucien Segura. At this point the narrative goes back in time to chronicle Lucien's life and - surprise, surprise - all the things his life has in common with the makeshift family in 1970s California.

It would be futile to dispute the sheer beauty of the language, but Divisadero left me quite unsatisfied. It felt like Ondaatje had two separate novels in mind at some point and crammed them together for some mad creative writing/science experiment. The two plots do not reflect one another in a provocative manner, leaving me wishing that he had just published two novellas instead. And there's no escaping the fact that sometimes Ondaatje crosses the line from poetry to pretension, particularly in the passage where Anna's first person narration sounds more like Walt Whitman than a modern day American woman in her late 30s - no matter how educated she is.

In case you're wondering, the title has two meanings that I know of. First, it refers to Divisadero Street in San Francisco, where Claire lives as an adult. Secondly it recalls the Spanish word "divisar," which means to gaze at something from a distance.