Alice Walker's personal New Age beliefs emerge most pointedly in a grateful Author's Note praising "the spirit of Eros" and "the Great Spirit of the Universe," but they also echo throughout the entirety of By The Light Of My Father's Smile, her first novel in six years. Oddly, these beliefs only seem insipid when rendered in her own voice. Walker's characters are much more convincing and generally speak in subtler platitudes, at least when they're not preaching about gender dynamics and why men and Europeans are the root of all the world's evil. This stiff pontification comes mostly at the end of a story that starts much more substantially, with a dead man coming to terms with the single hypocritical act that ruined the lives of everyone in his immediate family. His ghost observes omnisciently as his emotionally scarred daughters and their similarly damaged friends and lovers attempt to identify and overcome their own heartbreaks. These efforts continue well after their own deaths, as a daughter's lover becomes the father's mentor, and so forth. Oddly, this stuff doesn't read as particularly hokey: Walker's artfully abstract prose has weaved feminist self-affirmations into the supporting mesh of a solid story framework before (as in The Color Purple), and she skillfully pulls it off once again here. Her narrative wanders among a variety of points of view without regard for time, space, or quotation marks, and, by merging everyone and everything in her story into an unbroken, gently poetic flow, she gets across her points about spiritual brotherhood with a degree of protective subtlety that most New Age authors significantly lack.