Novelist Michael Ondaatje tipped his methodological hand three years ago, when he engaged film editor Walter Murch in the extended exploration of the art of the cut that became 2002's Conversations. Ondaatje's fiction has often spanned years, decades, and even centuries, and he's seemed perpetually keen to reproduce in prose the info-blitz effect that the movies get with montage. Ondaatje's new novel, Divisadero, may even supersede cinema, as it condenses events that would require an hour or so to properly explain onscreen down to a few pages. Then Ondaatje shuffles those passages, eschewing strict chronology.
Divisadero opens with two mothers dying in childbirth on the same day. Their daughters are raised as sisters on a California ranch, until one has a disastrous affair with a ranch hand who flees and begins a new life as a professional card cheat. The two girls split up: One becomes a San Francisco attorney for the indigent, and the other travels to Europe to study a long-dead French writer. The traveler meets one of the writer's relatives, and discovers an eerily similar story about forbidden love and paradise lost. Ondaatje gets through the whole novel in just over 270 pages, covering a lot of ground.
Because of Divisadero's brevity, a lot of it feels impressionistic and even underdeveloped. Or maybe that's just a byproduct of Ondaatje's most radical editorial decision: A little more than halfway through the book, he completely abandons the story of the two sisters and their poker-playing ex-ranch hand, and instead jumps back in time to deal fully with the French writer. The two stories share plenty of parallels, including the specter of absent parents and the idea that one person is pretty much as good as another on a cold, lonely night. But none of the narratives reach any kind of satisfying conclusion, and although Ondaatje's prose is as lovely as ever, the constant switching from first to third person—along with stylistic jumps that include dropping and resuming the use of quotation marks, and varying the chapter formatting—feel like a writer being unnecessarily difficult. At moments, Divisadero borders on brilliance, but it's a brilliance bound by experimental literary theory, not storytelling.