Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman

Sharon Spiegelman, the prattling narrator of Allegra Goodman's new novel, is a spiritual seeker. If you associate that kind of person with a flighty, credulous, smorgasbord-style approach to religion, you wouldn't be wrong about Sharon, but you wouldn't be entirely right, either. At the book's beginning, in the 1970s, Sharon finds herself in a Honolulu hotel room, bereft of money, purpose and the boyfriend, Gary, she'd traveled with across country from Boston. What she does have, though, are "all these questions and ideas about this higher power and this divine spirit, and maybe I would have been dealing with them if I hadn't been so broke."

With a guitar, a couple of Indian gauze skirts and a macramé bikini, Sharon launches into a series of adventures, beginning with enlisting, as an untrained volunteer, in a bird-counting project on a remote island with a pack of zoologists. Even as the team's errand girl, with a headful of mites caught from birds who are "so noble, but also so disgruntled ... staring with unforgiving beady eyes," Sharon hankers after the ineffable. She's a spiritual Goldilocks, sampling one bowl of porridge after another -- from the solitary contemplation of nature to, back in Honolulu, evangelical Christianity, workshop New Age-ism, Buddhism and Orthodox Judaism. Nature is too lonely, the ecstasies of revival meetings too fleeting, the Buddhist monastery too ascetic, academic theological studies too dry, Hasidism too restrictive; in other words, every faith she tries soon turns out to be too hot or too cold. Where's the religion that's just right for Sharon?

Goodman, who wrote about the vicissitudes of a hilariously neurotic clan in "The Family Markowitz" and the challenges of Orthodox Jewish life in "Kaaterskill Falls," has picked a tricky row to hoe in "Paradise Park." Sharon's Candide-like dizzyness makes her immediately amusing and endearing, and it's a delight to see Goodman flexing her considerable gift for humor again after the relatively solemn "Kaaterskill Falls." The beginning of the book is a deliciously frothy and eminently readable concoction, replete with sly slices of hippie life (pot farms, weeklong acid trips, communal households, a Buddhist monk who keeps slipping back into his old, uptight New Yorker self, rampant hugging) that never stoops to cheap sneers. Goodman makes her questing heroine naive but not actually stupid, with enough of the smart aleck (comparing the women in a Hasidic retreat to the schoolgirls in the Madeline picture books, for example) to make her irresistible as well as maddening. And Sharon's yearnings are genuine enough, egged on by the (very) occasional glimpses she catches of the infinite.

But like that friend (we all know at least one) who ardently embraces one new enthusiasm after the other, only to cast it aside when she realizes she hasn't found the ultimate answer, Sharon can be a little wearing. Her encounters with each new religious practice get a tad too predictable toward the late middle of "Paradise Park," and that's when Goodman steps up to bat to bring her exasperating heroine home. OK, so the resolution, if you know Goodman's fiction, is hardly surprising, but as another book critic I know put it, even a not-quite top-notch Allegra Goodman novel is so much better than most other writers' best efforts, why kvetch? "Paradise Park" is such a pleasure to read, with so many clever, astute touches (Sharon's letters to her disapproving father are small masterpieces of histrionics, outright lies, manipulation and smothered pleas for love) that to look any farther for a book to recommend for March would make me feel as fickle as Sharon herself.

-- Laura Miller

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"