Paradise Park

Ron Charles

It's too early to pick the happiest book of the year, but Allegra Goodman has set the bar pretty high with Paradise Park. This funny story of a woman's spiritual quest is so well designed for book-club discussions that the competition should just sit out for a couple of months.
— The Christian Science Monitor

From The Critics

Without much going for her besides an ability to perform Israeli folk dance, Sharon Spiegelman goes on a trip to Hawaii and gets unceremoniously dumped in a cheap motel by her egomaniacal boyfriend, who has decided to wander the earth with another, richer, earth-friendly girl. So begins Goodman's touching second novel about a clueless twentysomething's quest to find meaning. The novel's first passages are its most entertaining, as Sharon falls haphazardly from one job and pseudoreligious craze to another in 1970s Hawaii. Goodman has created a hilariously clueless protagonist in Sharon—a cloudy-headed hippie given to making pronouncements like, "I'm of the holistic persuasion, man, I don't take prescriptions"—and is able to sustain most of the novel on little else than her character. The problem comes when Sharon starts trying to grow up. As Sharon's spirit calms down, Goodman, whose first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, was a finalist for the National Book Award, still pulls off some wonderful passages, but you can almost hear the air hissing out of the book as it comes to a close. That's not to say that Sharon should have gone out in a blaze of glory, but this was one character you didn't want to see settle into domesticity.
—Chris Barsanti

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Goodman's (Kaaterskill Falls) marvelous new novel involves a woman's tragicomic search for spiritual meaning, a journey as physically peripatetic as it is emotionally migratory. As always, the key to enjoying Goodman's fiction is gradual immersion. Her narratives do not feature razzle-dazzle plot twists or melodramatic peaks, just quietly eddying waves of emotions and events that slowly build to a tsunami of insight. When, in 1974, college dropout and folk dancer Sharon Spiegelman follows her lover from Boston to Hawaii, where he runs off with a new girlfriend, she begins a 22-year odyssey distinguished by an earnest (but na ve and often foolish) quest for enlightenment. Her first mystical vision of "resting in the palm of God" comes on a remote island where she has joined an environmental group; disillusionment follows. A second vision gleaned while whale watching proves similarly exhilarating, then deflating. On and on Sharon goes, bouncing from one epiphanic experience to another, changing boyfriends, menial jobs and mentors, positive each time that she has solved the puzzle of existence and ascertained her place in the world. But each new venture--whether raising marijuana; embracing a Pentecostal Christian sect, then New Age and Buddhists beliefs and practices; dropping acid; re-enrolling in college to major in comparative religions; living with Bialystocker Hasids--fails to give her lasting solace. But Sharon is learning positive truths even as she despairs of finding the answer to her cosmic questions; and her voice, a pitch-perfect mix of irreverent vernacular punctuated by hyperbolic exhilaration, is a comic triumph. Sharon's story is in essence a spiritual picaresque saga, and when she at last finds both true love and a satisfying religious commitment, she must undergo the painful test of reconnecting with her self-absorbed parents, and learn to forgive. Readers will finish the novel feeling that, given faith in the ultimate goodness of life, things can turn out right. Author tour. (Mar. 6) Forecast: Major ad/promo, including sponsorship announcements on NPR, plus a whimsical cover in an eye-catching yellow, will alert readers to Goodman's new novel; the author's golden reputation and the rave reviews this title will draw will do the rest in making this mini paradise-park of a book a well-deserved bestseller. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It all starts with a whale-watching trip: "The sky swung back in liquid gold, the air mixed with the water.... It was a whale, but not just a whale. It was a vision. It was a vision of God." And from that moment on Sharon Spiegelman--indomitable, exasperating, ever-seeking Sharon--is on a spiritual quest. From her first days, abandoned in Honolulu by her boyfriend with only a macram bikini and a guitar to her name, to her conversion at the great Love Salvation Church (it didn't take), her months in a Buddhist temple, and, finally, her return home to Judaism, Sharon asks questions and makes mistakes but never gives up. Because she never quits, neither does the reader; because she cares so much, the reader does, too. Smoothly told with vivid descriptions, living characters, plenty of humor, and great understanding, this novel fills the heart and stretches the mind. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/00.]--Yvette Olson, City Univ. Lib., Renton, WA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Sharon Spiegelman is a folk-dancing, guitar-strumming, wisdom-seeking 20-year-old hippie fleeing social conventions and past connections when she arrives in Hawaii in 1974. For the next 20 years, she searches for her own personal paradise, trying out a series of homes, jobs, men, and religious experiences. She counts red-footed boobies and seeks God in the stars with Rich. She farms illegal crops and joins the Greater Love Salvation Church with Kekui. She sees God in the sounding of a whale with Wayne. She flies to Jerusalem to study Torah with Gary. Sharon enters each new phase of her search for Truth and Love with a completely open heart and an enthusiasm undimmed by disappointment. Ultimately her search takes her back to her roots, and she finds peace in the embrace of Mikhail and Orthodox Judaism. Goodman's quirky, endearing characters; her light touch with heavy subjects; and her skillful interweaving of humor, pain, and wisdom add up to a story that will both amuse and edify any readers wondering where to find their own paradise park.-Jan Tarasovic, West Springfield High School, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Bestselling Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls, 1998, etc.) takes a bold step forward with this comic novel about a very serious spiritual quest undertaken by a narrator who's as often obnoxious as endearing. We meet Sharon Spiegelman in the mid-1970s, in Hawaii, where she and boyfriend Gary have migrated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to save the Pacific's endangered species. But now he's taken off, leaving Sharon with a hotel bill she can't pay and"all these questions and ideas about this higher power." Over the next 19 years, mostly in Hawaii, Sharon pursues enlightenment in various forms, from joining a Pentecostal church to majoring in religion at the local university, until, about halfway through the story, she begins a slow journey back to the Judaism of her ancestors. None of this stops her from loving unsuitable men or from observing, with an exceedingly sharp eye, those purporting to dish out religious truth. (Of her control-freak Buddhist mentor:"How could you devote your whole life to contemplation . . . and still be such an asshole?") Sharon is equally aware of her own"fickle soul"; even in her most serious engagement, with the Bialystoker Hasid sect, she's unable to reconcile the mysticism she loves with regulations that are inimical to her free spirit. Or is she just lazy and undisciplined? For every astute remark, Sharon utters two pieces of post-hippie psychobabble; she's an admitted liar and (former) drug dealer; and her shamelessly manipulative letters to her estranged father and an unsympathetic professor would be revolting if they weren't so laughably ineffective. In short, Sharon is a wonderfully complex, utterly believable character, and Goodman softens none ofherunattractive qualities. Yet she's also truly, passionately seeking God, and she comes to a form of traditional-yet-customized Judaism that seems just right for her. Brilliantly crafted and pitched perfectly, which we expect from this author; but also challenging and deliberately uningratiating, which we might not.