Yesterday I read Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero. He is a beautiful writer and there are beautiful passages in this book, breathtaking descriptions of Sonoma County in California and right-on pictures of Tahoe and Vegas casinos and lovely evocations of Southern France. But as beautiful as the writing is, it is also overwrought, overdrawn, overdone. Subtlety is not in Ondaatje’s repertoire, or rather there is subtlety but it is subtlety to the most stylized, and the most ninth, degree. So in the end it hits you over the head hard, thereby losing any claim to subtlety.
Ondaatje’s characters are not real, they are extreme, and they are dealing with extreme situations. We have not one orphan, we have three; we have not one act of violence but many; we have not one violation of trust, we have a succession. Can three people really have so much bad luck mixed with unbelievably good luck and good looks and talents and intelligence and coincidence? Only in a romance novel could all this stuff happen. And so I must conclude that Ondaatje is a romance writer. The English Patient was one romance novel, and Divisaderois another. Beautifully written, yes, with language that is exquisite. Sometimes so exquisite I felt claustrophobic, as if the sentences were going to swallow me up and spit me out in velvet and silk.
Real people in extraordinary situations make for an interesting plot, a plot that can be the structure of a great book: let?s see what these people do and how they overcome the extraordinary! Look at Howards End by Forster or Martin Corrrick’s By Chance or Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons. But extraordinary people in extraordinary situations as plot is actually not as interesting as it sounds. Why not? Because all readers want identification: we want people we can understand to face situations that we can imagine, and fail or succeed in their face-offs. But superhuman or mythical beings taking on extreme events is the stuff of comics, or of romance novels. And in the in the end, just not enough to make a great book.
