The Temple of My Familiar. - book reviews

National Review, June 30, 1989 by J.O. Tate

ALICE WALKER has called her latest enterprise "a romance of the last 500,000 years," which turn out to have been about 499,999 years and fifty weeks too many for me. I didn't go for the "romance" part much either, maybe because a few days with Alice Walker seem like five hundred millennia with anyone else.

There's more wrong with The Temple of My Familiar than my allotted space -or indeed a whole issue of this journal-will allow me to record, but I think I can cite a few flaws, the first being its author's ineptitude. She has a lot of trouble with basics; or, as a severe judgment would put it, she can't write. One form of that incapacity is what we might call the laminatedmenu device, familiar from restaurants that poeticize the prosaic by piling up cheap adjectives. Instead o"salad" or even "green salad," we find "crispy green tossed garden salad." This is one of Alice Walker's favorite (and few) formulae. After some pages, the repetition gets brutal, and the reader may start to feel like a political prisoner being tortured systematically: "fat, perspiring woman," "weak-limbed old man," "ignorant tourist dollar," "shabby, poorly lighted flat," "calm detached concentration," "a bright red apple," "her shockingly young-looking, vulnerable, inexperienced, terrified, and pale-as-ashes mother"-all in the first 26 pages. Miss Walker is greatly committed to the laminated-menu technique; her novel ends with a double example, the last phrase being "a very gay, elegant, and shining red highheeled slipper," which may be received by a finally grateful reader as the coup de grace.

To take a different tack, I was at first incredulous upon beholding utterances such as "'To ask your understanding and forgiveness seems corniness personified,'" which would have remained dreadful even as a personal appeal from the author. A similarly bungled statement-"Though she had had sex, it had been brief"-seems so completely lacking in euphony, grace, and intensity as to inspire a similar but superior formulation: Though he had read many bad novels, they had all been better than this one. But after all, what isn't better than this? She listened to the music and sometimes she cried. Sometimes, crying, she lay back on her pink bed, her hand between her legs. There was a piece of music, especially, in his last album that moved her to her knees. She knew he had written it while thinking of her. She could come just listening to it. Alice Walker's hot stuff is not likely to tempt you to jump into her Jacuzzi. The following sums up as well as any other passage the vision of the novel:

Fanny thinks of the years during which her sexuality was dead to her. How, once she began to understand men's oppression of women, and to let herself feet it in her own life, she ceased to be aroused by men. . . . And then, the women in her consciousness-raising group had taught her how to masturbate. Suddenly she'd found her self free. Sexually free, for the first time in her life. At the same time, she was learning to meditate, and was throwing off the last clinging vestiges of organized religion. She was soon meditating and masturbating and finding herself dissolved in the cosmic All. Delicious.

We must add that in the orgasmic world of The Temple of My Familiar, the earth isn't the only thing that moves-the fruit stand does also. We keep circling back to fruitarian ecstasies ("A banana drove her wild"), following a strand that connects tbe primordial with the trendy, and ancient Africa with contemporary California. But this absurdity is only a minor one.

A larger, fatal failure of articulation extends to the heart of the book, its "Voices": interrelated narratives that are supposed to transcend time and place. These voices are not connected or supported by the requisite authorial force; and in this regard, Alice Walker's tenses and syntax too often approach those of a Dick and Jane reader: "The rock star Arveyda saw all of this. He also saw the cape. He put it on." "Now Suwelo was on the train going back home to California. He crossed the Rockies and he crossed the desert." "His eyes spoke. My womb leaped. Don't laugh! Though expressed in the language of imbeciles, this is the way it was!"

Now to compose "a romance of the last 500,000 years," all of the eloquence, the rhetoric, and the verbal inflections of Dante, Milton, and Joyce would have been required. But Miss Walker has transcended more conventions than those of time and placeshe has hurdled the conventional demands for technical competence and architectonic ability as well.

So the voices float, untethered by coherence yet related by one overriding continuity: they all speak with the voice of Alice Walker. The voices are only trivially differentiated, and soon converge as a choir of "ideas" Miss Walker has also broadcast in nonfictional forays. The voices don't represent "characters"-they are instead megaphones for Alice Walker's political fantasies, nutritional obsessions, racial theories, ethnic presumptions, feminist heresies, and intimations of personal divinity.