Photo credit: Noah Berger/Random House
Alice Walker, Author
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'NOW IS THE TIME TO OPEN YOUR HEART'
If the River Is Dry, Can You Be All Wet?
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with "The Color Purple," it's hard to imagine how it could have been published.
"Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart" is a remarkably awful compendium of inanities. There are New Age inanities: "She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives."
Feminist inanities: "She had seemed to feel, and to wonder aloud, about the possibility that only women, these days, dreamed of rivers, and were alarmed that they were dry."
Flower children inanities: "What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain?"
And plain old bad writing: "The moment I stood in front of any one of his paintings, she elaborated, my bird nature became activated. I felt I could fly!"
Like so many earlier Walker characters, Kate Nelson — or Kate Talkingtree, as she has recently renamed herself — is on a quest. But whereas the heroine of "The Color Purple" was struggling to free herself from a controlling and abusive husband, and trying to establish an identity of her own, Kate is simply looking for some fuzzy New Age affirmation of herself.
Kate may talk about being a "person of color" and the hardships sustained by black people over the centuries, but these allusions feel oddly generic and disembodied. Kate's own day-to-day life is that of a cosseted, widely published writer who is also "to some extent a public figure," someone who thinks nothing of taking off for weeks or months to go on journeys in search of some elusive peace of mind.
Kate has dabbled in Buddhism but "felt she had reached an impasse on the Buddhist road." She used to keep an "altar room" in her house — honoring deities like the Virgin of Guadalupe, Jesus and Che Guevara — but has recently dismantled it and covered her Buddha with a purple cloth. She now wants something new.
Looking for something new is a long-standing habit of Kate's. "Like Elizabeth Taylor," Ms. Walker writes, "Kate had been married many times. Some of these marriages had been very short. Three had lasted about a year. The others, one in which she'd borne children, were longer." These ex-husbands and children do not seem to figure much in her current daily life. After all, who has time for things like family, when there are pressing demands on one's time, like looking for personal empowerment?
Besides, husbands and children have a way of intruding upon Kate's pristine sense of self. When her first husband and their child gave her a serving dish ("a lively red and covered with white flowers") for Valentine's Day, her reaction was not gratitude but "anger that she had entered the unromantic era of life," and that "her child was in cahoots with her father in giving her this awful gift, this mirror in which she saw herself as someone whom time was passing by."
Now Kate has decided to end things with her current boyfriend, Yolo. Why? Because she feels that their journey together is over. (The people in this novel use the word "journey" even more than a method actor trying to figure out the arc of a character's life.) Because she keeps having a dream about a river that has run dry, and Yolo doesn't have this sort of dream. Because "unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?"
So Kate sets off on an all-women boat trip down the Colorado River. She tells her therapist: "I cannot believe my dry river, that we have been discussing for months, and that is inside me, is unconnected to a wet one somewhere on the earth. I am being called, she said."
Sufficient illumination apparently fails to result from this journey. So Kate sets off on another. This time it's to the Amazon, where she and half a dozen other seekers meet a shaman and ingest a drug called yagé, which is supposed to liberate them from their pasts and endow them with the wisdom of the ancients. The drug's first effect is vomiting and stomach distress, and members of the group are required to wear diapers to prevent accidents and perhaps to help them regress to a state of infancy.
While Kate is busy throwing up and having hallucinations, Yolo has gone to Hawaii, where his vacation turns into a kind of spiritual journey, too. Kate's and Yolo's trips provide Ms. Walker with an opportunity to introduce a cast of subsidiary characters, who like many of the people in her earlier novels turn out to be little more than fuzzy symbols of different sorts of victimization or long-winded mouthpieces for one cause or another.
We are introduced to several women who have been abused by men, and whose plights are used by Ms. Walker as an excuse for feminist speechifying. One woman killed her rapist, was sent to jail and then raped by her jailers; another was "incested" by her grandfather. We are also introduced to a man who says, "Selling drugs to oppressed people was our family business, for generations"; two Australian aborigines who talk mournfully about forgetting "that once upon a time we were one with our land and with our sea"; and some Hawaiian transvestites who speak about how they have decided to "live openly as women" until benevolent "Mother rule" is returned to their land.
In the end "Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart" is less a novel than a cloying collection of New Age homilies, multicultural pieties and trippy Carlos Castaneda-ish riffs, hung like politically correct Christmas ornaments on the armature of Kate's tortuous journey from self-pity to self-congratulation.