Talk Back

[malabar]

Alice Walker is best-known for The Color Purple, but her newer books have received mixed reviews. (Since there were several dealing with female genital mutilation in Africa, perhaps this is not too surprising.) Her characters have been steadily getting farther away from being actual human voices and more like simple mouthpieces for her opinions.

That said, I did get a lot out of this book. The protagonist, Kate Talkingtree, is a longtime New Age Seeker type who, at 57, is starting to feel her age. Her latest revelations first lead her to tell her lover, Yolo, that she feels like their relationship has hit a platonic stage. Being a Sensitive New-Age Guy, he takes this with a minimum of fuss and wishes her well (first bit of total fantasy!). She then embarks on a whitewater rafting trip on the Colorado River and an ayahuasca retreat in South America. Meanwhile, Yolo sets out for what he imagines will be a comforting, anodyne vacation in Hawaii. Both of them return wiser from their experiences and decide that they really do still want to be together as lovers.

So far, so formulaic. What I liked about this book was Walker's descriptions of her spiritual experiences. They are notoriously difficult to pin down, and seeing a talented writer take a shot at it was great. There was a very dreamlike quality to the whole book, even the most mundane bits of it, and maybe it should be approached more as magical realism than a standard novel for best effects.