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The Aesthete.

Article Excerpt
Michael Ondaatje's new novel, "Divisadero" (Knopf; $25), is named for a street in San Francisco where one of the book's characters, Anna, once lived. None of the action takes place there, and the street is mentioned only twice, in passing. Ondaatje was asked recently why he chose the title. "It suggests division, and the concept of looking at something from afar, the way the writer Anna does," he explained. "It is a book of separations and divisions, of two stories that link up." This is not entirely helpful, but it does give a hint about how Ondaatje writes his novels and how he wants them to be read. He is not telling stories; he is using the elements of storytelling to gesture in the direction of a constellation of moods, themes, and images. He is creating the literary equivalent of a Cornell box or a rock garden or a floral arrangement.

Ondaatje is an enemy of the linear. He has called his novels "Cubist," and we are almost commanded not to try to iron out the kinks. It's not easy to extract a continuous narrative from his books, anyway, because events bounce around chronologically, styles and points of view shift, and there are gaps and stray threads. When we first leave the character Anna, for example, she is a teen-age runaway; when she reappears, she is a scholar of French literature with a degree from Berkeley (and a place on Divisadero). There are many missing rungs on that ladder, and it is the same with all the characters in "Divisadero." Anna has two near-siblings: Claire, an adopted sister who is the same age, and Coop, an adopted brother who is four years older. Anna's mother died in childbirth, as did Claire's; Coop's family was murdered by a hired hand while he hid under the floorboards. They are brought up on a farm near Petaluma, California, in the nineteen-seventies. When Anna is sixteen, she becomes sexually involved with Coop; her father discovers them, beats Coop nearly to death, and drives off with Anna. Anna escapes from her father, but she never sees Coop or Claire again. Coop becomes...