Divisadero.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

The family Michael Ondaatje introduces at the beginning of Divisadero (a 2007 GG award winner) consists of a widowed father, whose wife has died in childbirth, and the baby girl, Anna. There is Claire, a second child the father takes home from hospital following another childbirth death and raises as Anna’s sister; and, finally, there is Cooper, a young boy who joins this disjointed group after his own parents are murdered. The scene is Northern California in the 1970s. The family manages fairly well, until a shattering event occurs which sends its wounded members off in different directions.

Ondaatje now follows the three children through their next incarnations. Anna moves to France to follow the life of the poet and writer, Lucien Segura. Claire, for her part, stays in San Francisco and works in the Public Defender’s Office. She is the only one of the three who maintains contact with the father. Cooper—“Coop”—begins the life of a professional card player, moving into and out of Lake Tahoe, Vegas, and other gambling Meccas.

About a third of the way into the story, Ondaatje’s luminous prose, rich with images, moves in quite a different direction. Anna meets and begins an affair with a French gypsy who has connections with Lucien Segura. Ondaatje now takes the reader along other pathways as Segura’s life unfolds. There are interstices throughout the book, with memories serving as the binding agent for the characters’ thoughts and actions. There are time swings—quick detours from past to present and back again. At times Ondaatje’s writing gets a bit ponderous, the language a little too precious. “Bird life,” he says at one point, “had hardly been awake when he’d entered the trees. A first chirp from above had fallen like a splash down towards him. But now the oaks and beech trees repeated melodies and verbose plans, so it felt as it were moving through a market place.”

But these lapses are minor and hardly detract from what is a startlingly beautiful novel, full of the mature ideas for which Ondaatje is so justly famous. Strongly recommended.