Divisadero Michael Ondaatje McClelland & Stewart ISBN 0771068727 hardcover, 288 pages $35 (CDN)

All avid readers have a handful of authors whom they consider particular favorites. It’s usually a “style” thing for me; authors on my list can pick their subject matter as far as I’m concerned, as long as they continue to write. It’s not easy getting on the list but once you’re on, you’re on for life. All your back-list titles, all that juvenalia, the journalism; later on the memoirs, the collected letters, the posthumously-published first drafts and fragments; the grocery lists.

Annie Dillard is one writer on my list; I think that I’ve read everything she’s published and I’m eagerly awaiting her second novel, The Maytrees. John Berger is another. At some point you become acutely aware of a favorite author’s mortality, wondering what you’ll do when there are no more of their books to anticipate.

Michael Ondaatje has been on my list since his beard was dark; which (judging from book jacket photographs) would mean Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and Running in the Family (1982) at the very least; boy he looks young in those photographs! That beard has been grey for several books now — it occurs to me that there might be a family resemblance to Zeus — and his books have been coming less regularly than in the “good old days.” Ondaatje’s previous novel was Anil’s Ghost in 2000; there was The Conversations five years ago but as fascinating as it was to listen in on Walter Murch’s musings about the art of editing film, The Conversations felt like an Ondaatje “pot boiler.” “This is all well and good” I’d said to myself, “but what I really want is another novel.” The wait went on.

All this preamble is to say that Michael Ondaatje’s new novel Divisadero had been on my radar screen long before it hit the bookstores. In such circumstances a devoted fan is almost reluctant to begin the new book, knowing that it might be another seven years until the next; it must be very difficult for any author to live up to the heightened anticipation of readers such as this. Which may be one of the reasons that I had such mixed feelings about Divisadero; how could Ondaatje hope to equal Coming Through Slaughter or In the Skin of a Lion, two books that only grow better in my memory?

I made marginal notes (in pencil, of course) while reading Divisadero, marking particularly vivid images or phrases and smiling benevolently at Ondaatje’s trademark “tics” as if they were long-absent friends (he has an excessive fondness for the word “gesture” for example; rivers and riverbeds thread through this text as through many others; and scars continue to leave their mark).

Two separate stories interweave and overlap in Divisadero. One is set thirty years ago in California’s Sonoma Valley, as an act of violence shatters the lives of Coop, a young farm hand, and Claire and Anna, two teenage girls living with their father on an isolated ranch. The other story plays out across the landscape of southwest France, with episodes that flash back and forth in time, relating the life story of a writer named Lucien Segura.

Some readers find Ondaatje’s novels difficult to unravel (a number of readers reportedly found The English Patient confusing, and were grateful that the movie version “straightened it all out”); others simply can’t get enough, and excavate the text in search of Ondaatje’s striking images: the loggers skating with cattail torches from In the Skin of a Lion; the Bedouin healer enveloped by small vials of medicine in The English Patient; the truck driver nailed to an asphalt road in Anil’s Ghost. Divisadero adds its share of vivid visuals to this image treasury: a gold-mining crew works the Russian River in northern California, with one character riding a suction hose that thrashes like a cracked whip; another character stands balanced from a single spike high within a church spire which is undergoing renovations in a village in south-west France. But there were also moments when I shook my head in dismay at some particularly florid passage, and entire sentences that would be just as much at home in some high-end Harlequin romance.

“Everything is collage” one character observes in Divisadero, and this is an apt metaphor for Ondaatje’s fiction style as well, each novel reading as if a collection of Ondaatje poems had jostled against each other until they’d felted together sufficiently to form a story from the parts. Done well — as Ondaatje has done so brilliantly in the past — this can result in writing which hooks itself into the reader’s subconscious, stories and characters which linger long after the last page is done. Done poorly — and Divisadero is far from being Ondaatje’s best — the reader confronts a mish-mash of parts which don’t quite connect.

I wrote a brief review of Divisadero for the next issue of Geist. Constrained by length I focused on the positives, but I’ve chafed ever since, feeling as if I’d not told the entire truth. This longer version of my review is a reconsideration of sorts, prompted by a rereading of John Berger’s To the Wedding, a novel which I’d last read ten years ago.

As with Ondaatje, Berger often writes in a style which could be likened to collage and To the Wedding is also built up from small fragments of text. Both Berger and Ondaatje are deservedly known for having a poet’s eye and keen sense of le mot juste. To the Wedding is truly a masterpiece; I was knocked out by it just as I had been on first reading it ten years ago. And when To the Wedding is set beside Divisadero it is hard not to note the latter’s faults.

To the Wedding is clear and elegant; I would go so far as to say that there is not one excessive word. The characters live and breathe, and exhibit emotions that are evidently hidden somewhere between the words. You cannot help to care about their lives; I wish I could say as much for Coop, Anna, Claire or Lucien Segura.

Divisadero is a novel of romance in the older sense of the word (it is no coincidence that two of its characters fall in love while reading the novels of Alexandre Dumas to each other). Thus it is not surprising to find it peopled with characters who are larger than life — cowboys and gold miners; gamblers and gypsies; poets and thieves — characters whose slightly heroic scale prevents the reader from considering them as “real”; you just don’t care about them in the same way that you care for Gino and Ninon, Jean and Zdena in To the Wedding.

As a result of all this pondering I have come to believe that as a reader you engage with the work of a favorite writer much as you relate to an old childhood friend who has moved away. A new novel — the first in seven years, say — is like a visit from this prodigal: you’re delighted, perhaps even overjoyed, and you anticipate an exuberant reunion in which you and he relive the adventures which you shared so long ago. You look forward to the new stories he’ll undoubtedly have to tell you, stories set in places you’ve never been. What you do not anticipate is that you may not share your old friend’s new enthusiasms, and that perhaps some of his new friends are not entirely to your taste. You wonder if the two of you might have grown apart. But the friendship remains; you don’t disown a life-long friend simply because they’ve made an unfortunate remark.

I offer this metaphor as a form of rationalization, to explain why I will continue to love Ondaatje’s work despite my mixed feelings about Divisadero. I know he is capable of writing something even better (how much easier it is to criticize than to create!); in fact I’m already looking forward — seven years? eight? — to his next…