OPAL: A LIFE OF ENCHANTMENT, MYSTERY, AND MADNESS
By Katherine Beck (Viking, $24.95)
Binfords & Mort
Whiteley in the 20s.
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Doubts followed Opal Whiteley almost immediately after she hit it big with her childhood diary, published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1920 when the author was 22. Chronicling a hardscrabble existence in the logging camps of Oregon and a storybooklike experience of nature (sample chap- ter title: "How Opal and the Little Birds From the Great Tree Have a Happy Time at the House of Dear Love"), the diary soon attracted skepticism could Opal really have written the whole thing as a 6- and 7-year-old? This, for instance: "I did have beginnings of hurry feels to go to the pig-pen. I have thinks Sadie McKibben saw the hurrys in my eyes. She said she would like to go hurrys to the pig-pen too."
Of course, the real question is not, Did a child write this? but rather, Who in the world would want to read it? It's an important question, for Opal to this day has followers who compare her to St. Francis; no less than three versions of her diary are in print (including one for children); a musical of her life has been produced; and there's even a charter school in Portland dedicated to her vision of creativity and communion with nature. It's also a question that that the Seattle mystery writer Katherine Beck frustratingly ignores, offering instead a painstaking account of Opal's movements from childhood to her long, sad decline and death in an institution in 1992. With myopic intensity, Beck addresses the burning issues of what parts of Opal's story could be faked, who she might have slept with, and what rich people she sponged off of (Beck calls her "the Kato Kaelin of the twenties and thirties").
It's all very hot stuff in the insular New Age world of Opal devoteesthe book has already stoked fires of controversy onlinebut not very meaningful if Opal's mannered, mossy mysticism gives you the "hurry feels" to get far, far away. DAVID STOESZ
Katherine Beck will appear at University Book Store (4326 University Way N.E., 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Thurs., Dec. 11.
A GOOD DIVORCE
By John E. Keegan (Permanent Press, $26)
John E. Keegan reminds me of his fellow local novelists Mark Lindquist and Jonathan Raban. Lindquist's 2000 Never Mind Nirvana blends a prosecutor's-eye view of a date-rape case with a tour of the local rock scene. Keegan, a former prosecutor and eminent attorney, dramatizes a child-custody battle set in Seattle's collision of counterculture and lawyer culture in the 1970s of mood rings and Open Marriage. Keegan does a better job of rendering intense emotional states than affectless Lindquist; like him, he nails the local scene of the epoch in question. Keegan's spot-on descriptions of the Deluxe Bar & Grill tête-à-têtes and the Brobdingnagian driftwood of Copalis Beach don't outdo the lyric beauty of the Seattle magicked into being by Raban's prose in Waxwings, but the legal travails in Divorce do echo the bogus child-murder case in Raban's bookthe scary way everyday events take on sinister overtones when toted up against you in court.
Keegan's tale asks you to decide the case for yourself. When uptight law partner Cyrus Stapleton's wife, Jude, joins a feminist women's group, is it fair for her to fault him for being such a square? (His idea of rebellion is risking colleagues' wrath by question-ing Ford's pardon of Nixon.) Does he deserve to be washing his dishes and socks in the same sink in a basement unit at the Alhambra Arms while she gets the manse? Should he really be dry-humping Jude's women's-group leader? And when Jude's sex life takes a socially unsanctioned turn and the kids act out (drugs, sex, life-risking behavior), should he rescue them from her self- actualizing pad?
There is some clunkiness in the narrative, but the story is absorbing and the characters ring true. TIM APPELO
John E. Keegan will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Sat., Dec. 13.
THE GREAT FIRE
By Shirley Hazzard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)
I don't think I've ever fought a book as fiercely as I did this one. Its October publication had the trappings of an event: This is Hazzard's first novel in the 23 years since her revered The Transit of Venus took the National Book Critics Circle Award; beside it on her mantel, she can now add the National Book Award, which Fire earned just last month.
It wasn't Hazzard's dense, specific style but a pair of central characters that I resisted: Helen and Benedict Driscoll, precocious teenagers living in 1947 Japan. They're encountered by Aldred Leith, a damaged, decorated, yet self- effacing English officer who comes to Kure (near Hiroshima) to complete a major book on the convulsive changes occurring in China, where he's traveled the prior two years.
Leith's father, Oliver, a randy, celebrated London novelist, has always been remote and chilly, a state his 32-year-old son, already divorced and the veteran of desultory affairs, begins to fear will be his, too. That is, until he meets 17-year-old Helen. She and her equally engaging brother couldn't have more unlikely parents. Australian and hateful, the senior Driscolls are grand creations, Wagner by way of Dickens: wife Melba with her lip-smacking delight in her (imagined) social superiority; husband Barry with his Queeg-like tyranny over the men he commands as the town's medical administrator.
