Once on This Island

By Walter Kirn

Though American writers still try it now and then, if only to prove how impossible it's become, weaving a whole country's social history into one great, multilayered novel is mostly a thing of the past in the U.S. What used to seem ambitious now seems arrogant--too many cultures, too many points of view. Elsewhere in the world, however, particularly in smaller countries where the political and the personal are more intimately intertwined, creating an epic of national identity still seems possible. A vital, if daunting, literary task.

This is just the task Rosario Ferre, one of Puerto Rico's leading novelists, sets for herself in Eccentric Neighborhoods (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 340 pages; $24), her second novel to be written in English. (Her first, The House on the Lagoon, was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award.) The book is a panoramic landscape dominated by two great family trees, both with deep roots and broad, overlapping branches. The Vernets are earthy Cuban immigrants, gung-ho, materialistic arrivistes out to make a fortune and a name. The Rivas de Santillanas are landed gentry, wistful, poetic denizens of Puerto Rico's preindustrial past. The island is large enough for both clans, but only just. As they grow, they crowd each other.

Eccentric Neighborhoods is nothing if not fertile, so dense with fables, anecdotes, reminiscences and allegories that readers may find themselves wishing for machetes to cut away the fictional undergrowth. As told by Elvira Vernet, the book's energetic, keen-eyed narrator, unlucky in love but gifted in perception, the stories of romance, betrayal and fortune seeking pile up gorgeously but shapelessly, like successive canopies of foliage. Still, vague patterns eventually show through. The brash Vernets grow steadily more Americanized and politically influential as the old aristocracy wilts away and the downtrodden peasantry struggles along unchanged. By the end of Elvira's lush and tangled tale, even the tropical landscape has been transformed. For better or worse (Ferre leaves the island's future an open question), greenbacks now grow where green hillsides used to be.

--By Walter Kirn