A Myth to Be Taken on Faith

By Paul Gray

THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR by Alice Walker

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 416 pages; $19.95

Alice Walker ascended from the realm of mere literature after Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel The Color Purple. The movie's huge commercial success -- and the controversy that arose over its portrait of black males -- ensured Walker's public renown as a woman with a cause, an author who, when she has a message, would rather write a book than call Western Union. Indeed, her poetry and fiction have always been, to some extent, polemical. Now that her potential audience has increased many times over, Walker, 45, has become more forthright about the burden of her prose: the horrors that whites have historically imposed on blacks and that men have inflicted on women. Perhaps these lamentable subjects cannot be exaggerated. But in her latest novel, Walker tries.

The Temple of My Familiar is almost all talk -- monologues and dialogues, chiefly by and among black women. The skeletal plot is an excuse to get the conversations going. Suwelo, a black professor of American history, travels from his California home to attend an uncle's funeral in Baltimore and to dispose of the house that comes as his inheritance. Suwelo is grateful for the respite provided by this visit; his wife Fanny (the granddaughter of Miss Celie, the heroine of The Color Purple) has discovered feminism and wants a divorce. It is not that she has stopped loving him, as she tells him, but rather that "I don't want to be married." Gloomily, Suwelo decides that "his generation of men had failed women."

His spirits lift when he meets Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie, two old and aged friends of his uncle's. These two drop by regularly to talk and reminisce; they prove themselves remarkable founts of memory, particularly Miss Lissie, who confides that she has lived in countless incarnations dating back to the dawn of time. Relating her experiences as a slave girl being transported to America, she interrupts herself to warn Suwelo, "You do not believe I was there? I pity you."

Suwelo believes. Short of hustling Miss Lissie out the door, that is probably his only option. For her voluminous story, to which a growing chorus of other voices gradually contributes, is an extended myth that must be taken on faith or not at all. Parts of it are enchantingly beautiful. She remembers primeval Africa as the Edenic cradle of life, when women and men lived separately and thus at peace and when lions killed only to put ailing fellow creatures out of their misery. But then the men decided to force their way into residence at the women's encampments, which Miss Lissie sees as the first of many tragedies: "In consorting with man, as he had become, woman was bound to lose her dignity, her integrity."

More evil followed. Ancient Africa was home to white people as well, but they were driven out because their pitifully pale skins could not protect them from the blazing heat and light ("The white man," Miss Lissie notes, "worships gold because it is the sun he has lost"). Thus was conceived whites' envy of blacks and a determination to crush them, a process that began, at least symbolically, in Greek mythology when Perseus beheaded Medusa, who was really the Great Mother, the Black African Goddess.

None of this admits argument, of course; legends, old or new, are not susceptible to logic. But when Walker's characters venture into more recent history, their opinions, to put it discreetly, seem open to debate. Is it, for instance, true that the white colonial powers driven out of Africa have tried to undermine the liberated countries by flooding them with pornography? Fanny's father, the Minister of Culture of a newly emerged nation, claims that "the reason millions of Africans are exterminating themselves in wars is that the superpowers have enormous stores of outdated weapons to be got rid of." Is this really the whole, or even a valid, explanation of the current slaughters across the continent? Fanny's mother discusses the viciousness that people, especially white ones, display as the consequence of cruelties done to them when they were young. "I shudder to think," she says, "what Hitler's childhood was like. But anyone can see that the Palestinians and their children are reliving it under the Israelis today."

The most hateful aspect of this last comment is not its content but its smug, self-righteous assurance ("anyone can see"). Ultimately, all of Walker's principal narrators reveal themselves as dictators manque, people who believe that the truth is whatever they happen to say and who will tolerate no dissenting opinions. Fortunately for them, their author provides none. She rewards her actors with the good life, California style, where suitably enlightened men bake bread and Fanny can gloat over the advantages of elevated consciousness: "She was soon meditating and masturbating and finding herself dissolved into the cosmic All. Delicious."

Walker's relentless adherence to her own sociopolitical agenda makes for frequently striking propaganda. But affecting fiction demands something more: characters and events in conflict, thoughts striking sparks through the friction of opposing beliefs. The cumbersome ideological weight of The Temple of My Familiar will lead some, probably many, to praise it as a novel of ideas. But it is something else entirely, and disturbingly: a novel of allegations.