This 'Time,' it's colorful, but tedious
In her 1982 novel "The Color Purple," Alice Walker created some of the most vivid, memorable characters in contemporary fiction. However, in her latest novel, "Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart," she has created one of the most insufferably self-absorbed in protagonist Kate Nelson Talkingtree, around whom the book revolves.
Kate is a bright, passionate woman for whom a solid, comfortable life is not enough. A well-published author who has been married several times and had numerous lovers of both sexes, she is 57 years old and in the midst of a tender relationship with a sensitive, intelligent painter, Yolo, when wanderlust and a fear of aging get the better of her.
"Her life was changing. She had felt it begin to shift beneath her feet. Or above her feet, because the change had started in her knees. In her fifty-seventh year they had, both of them, mysteriously, out of the blue, begun to creak."
She feels a shabbiness in her home as well, and begins to take down pictures, dismantling her altar room with its candles and mishmash of deities "from the Virgen de Guadalupe to Che, Jesus to her friend Sarah Jane, who'd been shot to death by death squads in Honduras." The disarray of her house soon comes to mirror "a dissolution she felt growing inside herself."
She begins to dream each night of a river gone dry, which her friends suggest means she should find a real river to travel. So Kate's first foray is a rafting trip down the Colorado with a group of women, leading to some new dream revelations and a vow of celibacy. But impatient, she begins to appropriate traditions of other cultures, embarking on a journey into the
It is a motley group. There is the wealthy, bulimic Rick, whose disreputable family has made him feel so guilt-ridden he thinks himself invisible to others with whom he might develop a relationship; Lalika, who spent horrific years in prison after killing a man who tried to rape her; Missy, who was abused by her grandfather. "They had the look of people deliberately distancing themselves from the center of things, as their own cultures defined it. Seeking the edge, the fringe. But also, paradoxically, the heart."
The medicine the group takes, yage, not only elicits a sense of enlightenment but great, messy waves of purging as well, and it gets tedious to read of all the bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. They call it "visiting Grandmother," the maternal archetype representing feminine wisdom as a counterbalance to a male-dominated society. The drug is to help the group connect with their "interior world." It unleashes dreams and memories, but unlike Castaneda's florid hallucinogenic adventures of the mind, Walker's descriptions of Kate's dreams are decidedly somber and self-absorbed. Often they are parables helping connect her to her ancestral past. This paves the way for periodic diatribes against the world's injustices, but they seem a little pasted on, not organically arising from internal revelation or personal immediacy.
Alternately compelling and exasperatingly self-indulgent, "Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart" seems to be an utterly sincere offering. The chronicle of one woman's spiritual journey unfolds as a quest for meaning and self-discovery, and Walker surely intended it to be inspirational, a call for introspection and rebirth, perhaps. And it's not uninteresting -- the myriad cultures she draws from during Kate's quest are fascinating. (The abandoned Yolo has his own parallel revelations and adventure during a trip to Hawaii, which makes for interesting reading but makes the overall structure quite disjunct.) But for a writer with Walker's impressive skills, it is all rather sloppily squashed together.
Ultimately, "Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart" reads as rather tedious, middle-age navel gazing. For this reader in the midst of her own midlife vicissitudes, now is clearly not the time for "Now."
