Portnoy, Move Over

By Paul Gray

Nothing in Allegra Goodman's previous fiction--two volumes of short stories and the highly praised novel Kaaterskill Falls (1998)--has quite prepared readers for the sustained comic exuberance of Paradise Park (Dial; 360 pages; $24.95). Her earlier work certainly wasn't grim, but it tended toward the polished and well mannered and resonant, a la 19th century British fiction. Not this time. Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth before her, Goodman has achieved a breakthrough book by discovering and recording a thoroughly uninhibited narrative voice. Bellow found Augie March, and Roth hit upon Alexander Portnoy. Goodman gives the world Sharon Spiegelman.

The world might be inclined to give the relentlessly self-absorbed Sharon right back were she not so endearingly funny, all the more so because she is unaware of her own wackiness; she cracks jokes without getting them. Sharon dates her search for God to 1974 when, as a 20-year-old folk dancer expelled as a sophomore from Boston University for various convincing reasons, she fetches up in Honolulu with her boyfriend Gary, 35, a "Vietnam-era" graduate student who promptly ditches her, leaving her stuck with the hotel bill. She can't afford to go back to the mainland U.S., and a dunning letter she sends to her father, who happens to be a dean at B.U., elicits a predictably chilly response. So Sharon drifts, acquiring another boyfriend and growing and selling organic marijuana in a jungle on Molokai: "We lived a pastoral life with capitalist interruptions."

She discovers her purpose in life on a whale-watching boat filled with tourists. Suddenly a huge tail breaks the surface of the water: "It was as if the whole ocean was sliding open. And I saw something there. The world was big, not little. The place was deep." Unlike the jostling throng of gapers around her, Sharon knows what she has seen: "It was a vision of God."

She dedicates herself to confirming and recapturing this transcendent moment. She first gives Christianity a whirl, attending services at the Greater Love Salvation Church, "a Pentecostal millenarian revivalist congregation." And although she accepts Jesus as her Saviour, she rather quickly grows annoyed at what she sees as his unresponsiveness: "Lord, sometimes I feel like you really aren't listening." Next she hitches up with a group of Buddhists but soon finds the regimen and food unpalatable, "because it seems like there's a fine line between purification and starving to death."

Further misadventures ensue, during which Sharon flunks a religion course at the University of Hawaii. She finds herself reluctantly drawn toward the Jewishness that is her birthright, even though her upbringing was secular. Providentially--just maybe--she receives a letter from the long-lost Gary, who is studying the Torah in Jerusalem. Unannounced, Sharon flies there to join him and to narrow her search: "This is the ancient city of Jerusalem; I'm going to get some answers." Alas, Gary is too absorbed in his research to have time for her, and the answers don't arrive.

Yet Sharon doesn't give in to despair. That is both the maddening and redeeming thing about her. Her yearning is real: "There is this whole spiritual existence out there and I can't get there." Her questions, however, are a cockeyed amalgam of Me-generation nostrums: "WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO? HOW MANY BOOKS? HOW MANY JOURNEYS? WHAT ARE THE WORDS AND WHAT KIND OF FOOD? MACRO? MICRO? DO ROOTS FEED THE SOUL? CARROTS, TURNIPS, POTATOES? OR THE ANCIENT SONGS?"

Goodman eventually allows her heroine, a 1970s flower child who grows considerably crimped and brown around the edges during the roughly 20 years covered in the novel, a measure of maturity and self-awareness. And not a moment too soon, because Sharon sometimes threatens to become as wearisome to readers as she does to her sequential lovers and acquaintances. But whenever Sharon's narcissistic bromides start to become predictable, the author manages to find a new way of conveying her character's addled but nevertheless good instincts. Sharon admires, for example, the poetry of Keats but stumbles a little in explaining why: "What blew my mind was John Keats had created all this poetry when he was my age, and then he died, and his whole voice was lost to the world like Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. He was just an unbelievable talent." Paradise Park displays a talent that is sly and altogether believable.