Customer Reviews

Paradise Park

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I dutifully read Kaaterskill Falls for my book group, but only out of loyalty to my fellow members. It was so slow and so small, I thought. So I avoided Paradise Park until I saw it in the street for a couple of bucks. Then I remembered how much I had loved what I had read of Allegra Goodman in the New Yorker and I gave her another chance. Besides, Kaaterskill Falls was such a success, so beloved by everyone except me, why should I hold it against her? Why should she write a book especially for me? Well, as it turned out, she did and it's Paradise Park. Goodman got to me in the same way that Salinger captured me in junior high school. I ended up talking like Sharon Spiegelman for a week. Now I have my eighty-five year old mother reading the book. She not only thinks it's really funny (which we'll pay retail for in my family) but she's starting to talk like Sharon too. I am horribly fascinated by all the negative reviews, from critics and customers alike. If America hates Sharon Spiegelman, how do they feel about me? It's truly shaken my confidence. Do I sound self-absorbed? Do I sound like Sharon Spiegelman? Good!

Paradise Park isn't nearly as acoomplished as Goodman's first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, but it's a fun failure. Kaaterskill Falls was a finely tuned debut with a carefully interwoven group of characters slowly coalescing into a crystaline picture of religious Judaism in the mid 1970s. It was a finely written book. Paradise Park is an all-over-the-place scattershot of a novel that seems forced and unfocused. The meandering plot is tough to put up with -- I had to keep setting the book down and getting back at it when I'd built up more patience. As Sharon, the novel's protagonist and narrator, wanders from one spiritual experience to the next without changing as a character (until the very end), I was left just frustrated.

That said, however, there's still a lot of fun to be had reading this book. So episodic it could almost be a progressive collection of short stories, there's great pleasure to be had in some of this novel's sections. Sharon's life on the periphery of the University of Hawaii and her entanglements with various members of that community are often hilarious and touching. It was interesting to get a taste of the native culture, and Goodman writes about the island's beauty and its native inhabitants with beauty and grace.

Goodman is never able to give Sharon a consistent voice. Eloquent one page and awkward the next, Goodman vacilates between dumbing her narrator down and using her as a conduit for her (Goodman's) own insights. As a result, Sharon is a character we can never get a solid fix on. She keeps coming in and out of focus -- just when we have a feel for her, Goodman lapses back into prose that feels totally alien to Sharon, and we lose track of her again.

So this novel definitely has its pleasures, but as a whole, it's less than satisfying.

I totally enjoyed Allegra Goodman's short stories, and thought that Kaaterskill Falls was an elegant, insightful work; therefore, I couldn't wait to buy her latest. What a complete disappointment! First, I just hated Sharon, the spiritual seeker in the novel. I realize that it isn't necessary to like the protagonist in order to get something out of a novel, but I had trouble getting beyond this character. Sharon embodies the worst of her generation (mine!). She is completely self centered and self serving, and all other characters exist simply to serve the narrator. This might be an interesting character study of a pathological egomaniac if Goodman had bothered to show how Sharon came to be the way she is, but all we get are hints of a lonely childhood. I hate to say this about a work by a gifted writer who features Jewish culture (my two stars are for this aspect--we need more writers like this) but I cannot recommend this book to anyone!

It took me awhile to figure out what I thought of this book which also made me realize it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as Kaaterskill Falls. I finally decided the heroine was extremely annoying. I expected her to become an adult long before she reached 40 for G-d's sake. The book is 20 years of meanderings of a selfish clueless girl whose supposedly deep spiritual thoughts and yearnings are far shallower than they first appear and whose character is never fully fleshed out. She never becomes anyone you would even remotely want to spend any time with. Although she eventually marries and has a child, you suspect no learning has occured and nothing ever changes.

Think of what it's like to have a flaky friend who keeps disappearing from your life. She moves away. Joins a commune. Gets a new boyfriend and becomes all caught up in his world. Breaks up and falls into a bunch of deep funks that keep her at a distance from you. Well, reading Paradise Park is like having that friend - twenty years later - tell you what the heck was going on during those years. That's probably the inherent problem in Allegra Goodman's novel, which, incidentally, sincerely captivated me. Lots of us have friends like Sharon, and sometimes we're just not patient with their flightiness and hyper-self-exploration and, yes, self-centeredness. Maybe if I really had a friend like Sharon, I could care less twenty years hence what she'd been doing all this time. Frankly, though, what is especially unique about Paradise Park is how Allegra Goodman really explores the role of spirituality and religion in a contemporary life. I appreciated that fresh exploration, so I'm recommending this admittedly meandering tale to my friends.

This is the first book I've read by Goodman and I thought it was great. There are so few fiction books written about a young woman's spiritual quest. The main character is easy to understand and life like and appealing. I know people just like her and can relate to some of her experiences myself. Haven't you ever noticed how often people who have a troubled childhood take A LOT longer to grow-up? Sharon is like that,too.

There has always been something a little mystifying about Goodman's work. At its best, mostly in her short stories, it concentrates its finest energy on exquisitely rendered details from which it is left to the reader to extract the meaning.

What was mystifying was whether Goodman herself had a clear notion of what her details added up to. Once she had been hailed as a wunderkind, readers tended to extend her the benefit of the doubt and impute an embarrassment of profundities to her pointillist prose.

At no time was this more true than in the reception of her first novel "Kaaterskill Falls." There were more than several hints that the meaning Goodman herself extracted from her details was so insipid as to belie all the great criticial acclaim for which she'd been singled out; but the hints were sufficiently ambiguous--and the reputation sufficiently established--that writers and critics continued to generously and imaginatively impute.

With this last effort the mystery appears to be solved. Goodman here does not confine herself to pointillist details but fills in the blanks--endlessly, endlessly--and the result is stunningly vapid.

How much craftier this writer was when she allowed the intelligent imagination of her best readers to go to work at assembling a meaningful totality. Now that she has done it for us it seems to cast a different light on all her work.

Allegra Goodman's "Paradise Park" does the impossible: It take us on a twenty-year existential whine during which the self-absorbed adolescent persona of Sharon Spiegelman changes not one iota. Scenery changes; names and faces change; presumably, the world we all inhabited was still out there and changing (though little of it invades the head and heart of this confused co-dependant-in-waiting ); -- Sharon doesn't, aside from a costume shift from Hawaiian floral to Hasidic basic. Worse yet, once she has finally arrived at her place of personal epiphany, the Crown Heights Bailystok community, it seems more like some nightmarish cult with her reaction more befitting the wide-eyed followers of David Koresh. Oy. Curiously, all the Jewish-ness of this novel seems to be coming to us from some "Orthodox Judaism for Dummies" guidebook. Pick up any Chaim Potok title for the real thing well-told. And/or Tom Robbins for the literary fireworks totally absent in this plodder.

My other task today is to find the reviewer shill (from "US News&WR" as I recall ) whose rave review took me immediately to Amazon for the buy. Must have been Ms. Goodman's uncle....

The main character of Paradise Park was Sharon, a folk dancing hippy who follows her boyfriend to Hawaii. When she is abandoned on the island with nothing, instead of going home and starting a new and better life and reconsiling with her family, she stays in Hawaii to wander. At times the reader is drawn to her, feeling sorry for her and her situations. However, she is extremely self-absorbed and cannot stop whining about her situation. I believe that this character was supposed to be like that, and was written very detailed by Allegra Goodman, in a poetic and thought-out manner. This woman is going on a journey to find God and religion, but NOTHING ends up working for her, fulfilling her. Finally she finds Judaism, but even that isn't good enough for her. In the end she still critisizes the religion. People tell her that she hasn't changed, and she hasn't, but she doesn't see it that way.
However, the overall message in this book is excellent. It is about finding yourself and not letting anybody stop you. She went through many things, which were essentially the same situations with different names and places, but in the end, she found what made her happy.

"Paradise Park" purports to be about Sharon Spiegelman's search for God which eventually leads her to Orthodox Judaism, marriage and a baby. At the end of the book she encounters the man who had abandoned her at the beginning of the book...could a sequel be far behind? Dancer that she is, she just seems to keep changing partners.
Throughout the book, Sharon never matures: she merely changes direction. Her marriage and motherhood seem very unfulfilling despite what we are led to believe.

On the up side, Allegra Goodman's depiction of the various religious and social organizations through which Sharon tries to find God are depicted with honesty and wit. None of them, even Judaism, are held up to be perfection.
I just don't think I've ever met a character that I wanted so much to shake and say "Grow up!"