Paradise Park

New York, NY: The Dial Press, 2001. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Kathy Osborn (Jacket illustration). Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With Reading Group Guide. [8], 360 pages. Signed by author. DJ has slight wear and soiling. From Wikipedia: "Allegra Goodman (born 1967) is an American author based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent novel, The Cookbook Collector, was published in 2010. Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven. Goodman was raised a Conservative Jew in Honolulu, Hawaii. She graduated from Punahou School in 1985. Goodman then went on to Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. degree and met her husband, David Karger. Both were regulars at Harvard Hillel, and prayed in Harvard Hillel Orthodox Minyan. They then went on to do graduate work at Stanford University, where Goodman earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature. Her short story "La Vita Nuova" was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2011 and was broadcast on Public Radio International's Selected Shorts in February 2012. Brilliant, fresh, funny, and wise, Allegra Goodman has delighted readers with her short stories in The New Yorker and her critically acclaimed collections Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz. Her celebrated first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, was a national bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. Now, in Paradise Park, Goodman introduces one of the most endearing, exasperating, and indomitable heroines in modern literature: Sharon Spiegelman. Abandoned by her folk-dancing partner, Gary, in a Honolulu hotel room, Sharon realizes she could return to Boston, and her estranged family, or listen to that little voice inside herself. The voice that asks: "How come Gary got to pursue his causes, while all I got to pursue was him?" Thus, with an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions (a guitar, two Indian gauze skirts, a macrame bikini, and her grandfather's silver watch) Sharon begins her own spiritual quest: living with the red-footed boobies, embracing the Edenic rain forests of Molokai, seeking enlightenment (with and without men) at the Greater Love Salvation Church, the Consciousness Meditation Center, a couples workshop in Waikiki, the Torah-Or Institute in Jerusalem, and in Professor Friedell's University of Hawaii course on world religions. Ever the optimist, Sharon is sure each time that she has struck it rich "spiritually speaking" until she comes up empty. Then, in a karmic convergence of events, Sharon starts on the path home to Judaism. Still, even as she embraces her tradition, Sharon's irrepressible self tugs at her sleeve. Especially when she meets Mikhail, falls truly in love at last, and discovers what even she could not imagine, her destiny. Derived from a Kirkus review: Bestselling Goodman takes a bold step forward with this comic novel about a very serious spiritual quest undertaken by a narrator who's as often obnoxious as endearing. We meet Sharon Spiegelman in the mid-1970s, in Hawaii, where she and boyfriend Gary have migrated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to save the Pacific's endangered species. But now he's taken off, leaving Sharon with a hotel bill she can't pay and "all these questions and ideas about this higher power." Over the next 19 years, mostly in Hawaii, Sharon pursues enlightenment in various forms, from joining a Pentecostal church to majoring in religion at the local university, until, about halfway through the story, she begins a slow journey back to the Judaism of her ancestors. None of this stops her from loving unsuitable men or from observing, with an exceedingly sharp eye, those purporting to dish out religious truth. Sharon is equally aware of her own "fickle soul"; even in her most serious engagement, with the Bialystoker Hasid sect, she's unable to reconcile the mysticism she loves with regulations that are inimical to her free spirit. Or is she just lazy and undisciplined? For every astute remark, Sharon utters two pieces of post-hippie psychobabble; she's an admitted liar and (former) drug dealer; and her shamelessly manipulative letters to her estranged father and an unsympathetic professor would be revolting if they weren't so laughably ineffective. In short, Sharon is a wonderfully complex, utterly believable character, and Goodman softens none of her unattractive qualities. Yet she's also truly, passionately seeking God, and she comes to a form of traditional-yet-customized Judaism that seems just right for her. Brilliantly crafted and pitched perfectly, which we expect from this author; but also challenging and deliberately uningratiating, which we might not.