Banana Rose

Banana Rose is the story of Nell Schwartz, a Brooklyn-born Jewish girl who moves to the Taos of communes and sweet cedar smoke, transforms herself into Banana Rose (because she's "bananas"), falls in love with a horn player named Gauguin, and believes they can stop time if they just love hard enough.  It's also about Nell and Anna, a strange-eyed writer as lonely as the Nebraska farm where she grew up, whose kisses taste like raspberries and who teaches Nell what it means to be an artist.  But most of all, Banana Rose is about Nell's struggle with her own wild heart, with the demands of canvas and paint, with her family and faith, and with her irrepressible longing for home.

The bestselling novel from the beloved author of Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Long Quiet Highway is now available in paperback for the first time.  With a half-million copies in print of her three remarkable books of nonfiction, Natalie Goldberg has inspired a generation of writers with her insight, humor, and empathy.  Subtly hilarious and achingly raw, her first novel Banana Rose has rewarded her devoted fans while attracting a whole new readership to her work.

Banana Rose is the story of Nell Schwartz, a Brooklyn-born Jewish girl who moves to the Taos of communes and sweet cedar smoke, transforms herself into Banana Rose (because she's "bananas"), falls in love with a horn player named Gauguin, and believes they can stop time if they just love hard enough.  It's also about Nell and Anna, a strange-eyed writer as lonely as the Nebraska farm where she grew up, whose kisses taste like raspberries and who teaches Nell what it means to be an artist.  But most of all, Banana Rose is about Nell's struggle with her own wild heart, with the demands of canvas and paint, with her family and faith, and with her irrepressible longing for home.

Publishers Weekly

That the art of writing has many facets, some slippery, is demonstrated by this first novel from writing guru Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones), which turns out to be a rambling, rather indulgent memoir of marriage and friendship in an age of post-hippie adjustment. ``I thought the hippie years would last forever,'' reflects Nell Schwartz from Brooklyn, aka ``Banana Rose,'' who's living in a Taos commune, painting the awesome New Mexico landscape, when a sexy red-haired musician known as ``Gauguin'' blows into Taos with his brass saxophone. Soon ardent lovers, Nell and Gauguin depart for life in cities (including New York and its Jewish deli delights). But passion cools with marriage, ridiculous in-laws and the prospect of daily reality in ``Minneapolis, for good.'' Gauguin turns unconvincingly bossy and square, annoyed by Nell's caf art show, her carefree ``women's libber'' ways and her Jewishness, which she fiercely protects amid the alien Midwestern corn. For solace, Nell turns to Anna Gates, whose mountaintop funeral opens and closes the novel as a frame and comment on the Gauguin/Nell relationship. In life, Anna was willowy and fair, a writer of guileless little sketches and ``a six-foot-one-inch lesbian'' whom Nell had tenderly loved but slept with only once. Finally, Nell's painful losses spur her to redemptive literary activity. Sentence by sentence, Goldberg's writing is, not surprisingly, sensitive and quick, but her plot meanders like a sleepy bee, settling down now and then for a scene as sweet as nectar but too often simply buzzing around in the air. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Mar.)