Between East and West

The author of "The Icarus Girl," on Afro-Cubans in London.

Helen Oyeyemi (Sarah Wood)

THE OPPOSITE HOUSE

By Helen Oyeyemi

Doubleday. 258 pp. $23.95

Recent postcolonial novels explore the cultural bouillabaisse: characters of various national origins, creeds and colors, living in an international capital and queasily negotiating issues of cultural transition. They have their heritages, African, Indian, Arabian, Jewish; they may speak Farsi or Spanish at home -- or, if they're very young, they may speak only snippets of their parents' native tongue -- but socially they speak the majority language (often English or French), and they feel they have one foot in another country. They feel they are losing a sense of history, but the flux is creating something new.

The 22-year-old writer Helen Oyeyemi makes another contribution to this genre with her second novel, The Opposite House. This is not to say that The Opposite House, or anything about Oyeyemi's writing, is generic. Hardly. She is a startling literary prodigy. She wrote her mature first novel, The Icarus Girl, at age 18. That book displayed Oyeyemi's gift as a fantasist. She has the ability to shift between realism and expressionism without surrendering to self-indulgence; it's a difficult trick to pull off. Her writing is delightfully eccentric.

She brings that special sensibility to her new novel of lives split between the multicultural West and "the opposite house" -- dreams, longings and sensibilities rooted elsewhere. The story is narrated by Maja Carmen Carrera, a semi-professional jazz singer in her early 20s, living in London, sharing her unstable life with her parents, black Cuban émigrés; her boyfriend, Aaron, a white Ghanaian; and the baby growing inside her that she keeps secret for most of the story. Maja's academic father is a skeptic who nonetheless attends Mass; her mother combines faithful Catholicism with fidelity to the Cuban religion of Santeria and its complex system of deities. Papi and Chabella (the mother) spend the story feuding over an altar in the entryway and her Santeria beads.

The other satellites in Maja's psychological orbit include her best friend, Amy Eleni, a lesbian of Cypriot extraction, and ancestral presences, such as her late great grandmother, Bisabuela Carmen, a Santería priestess. Maja and Amy obsess over the symbolism in Hitchcock's "Vertigo," and they personify their psychological chaos as shadow identities they nickname "personal hysterics": "My hysteric smells foreign, like perfumed sand, but maybe that's how she's supposed to smell," Maja reflects. Amy's personal hysteric "walks three paces behind me at all times [then] she jumps on my back and takes me down."

If The Opposite House sounds like a busy novel, it is. Every two or three chapters of Maja's story alternate with a mythic account of the adventures of Aya Saramagua, a Santería goddess. Her story unfolds mysteriously; her tale, which is allegorical, blends Santería lore with the fancy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Aya Saramagua lives in a "somewherehouse" in which one magic door opens to London, the other to Lagos. Aya Saramagua leaves the somewherehouse in search of her parents, finds children who grow from seeds and befriends a suicidal young girl named Amy who wears (like everyone else in the fable narrative) many faces. The dominant principle of Aya Saramagua's reality is " ache, or power. When the accent is taken off it, ache describes, in English, bone-deep pain. . . . Ache is, ache is is is, kin to fear -- a frayed pause near the end of a thread where the cloth matters too much to fail." Aya, a goddess, lives, loves and aches beyond the human scale.

To really enjoy parts of The Opposite House, the reader has to let go of logical narrative expectations. Aya Saramagua's secondary narrative is best approached as prose poetry (Oyeyemi will occasionally even break the prose into verse-like lines), a wild ride on a horse of untamed metaphor: "Aya steps through her London door and crosses concrete slopes that balance drowsy houses on their shoulders. Night's edge blunts itself at traffic-light level."

Is there a symbiotic relationship between Amy (the suicidal girl in the mythic narrative) and Amy Eleni, Maja's best friend? Might all these images possess other levels of meaning and coherence to readers intimately familiar with the Santería religion? It's our guess. The same holds true for the loose ends of Maja's domestic drama. She declares (then retracts) that she is moving back to her birthplace. Will she really move to Cuba? At the end of The Opposite House, Maja's relationships with her parents, friends and boyfriend are still rocky, and the rationale behind Oyeyemi's use of a double narrative is still ambiguous.

The Opposite House is top-heavy with themes, symbols and motifs. It's overcrowded (and arguably unfinished), yet in its own way extraordinary. Though the first hundred pages are rough going, slowly the reader accepts the eccentricities and grows to appreciate Oyeyemi's rare jewels. The very first chapter is entitled "Telling it Slant" (after Emily Dickinson's advice "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant"). Oyeyemi writes slantwise. She has fashioned a narrative that is at turns comic, lovely and grotesque. She has an original voice and a rich gift for conjuring the fantastic. At age 22, she is already an innovator. Look what she's done to the contemporary novel of the cultural bouillabaisse. She's added a magical dimension that recalls the visionary worlds of Emily Dickinson, Neruda and even Rimbaud. ·

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and social critic living in Charleston, S.C. His social criticism often appears in Dissent.