The Pagoda

Set in Jamaica in 1893, Powell's anguished if not entirely persuasive third novel (after A Small Gathering of Bones) tells the story of Lowe, an aging Chinese shopkeeper whose 35-year marriage of convenience to a lesbian octoroon named Miss Sylvie becomes a marriage of love as the couple faces the secrets in their pasts. After 12 years of estrangement between Lowe and their daughter, Elizabeth, he decides to write her a letter explaining the hidden origins of their family (which involve his stowaway immigration from China to Jamaica on a slave ship during the 1850s). Before he can finish the letter, however, his shop burns down, killing Cecil, the white man who smuggled him into the country and sexually abused him, but who also set him up in business. Freed of his secret debts to Cecil, Lowe seizes the chance to start his life anew. On the property where his shop once stood, he builds The Pagoda, a school and meeting house for the other Chinese on the island--but not before facing up to the loss of his livelihood, his estrangement from his Chinese heritage and the overriding secret of his family life. Saturated with kaleidoscopic, erotic description and driven by a keen awareness of race and class, this lush historical work, despite distant and uneven characterization and mysteriously disappearing subplots, opens a door on to an exotic, imaginary world where sex roles and racial tensions are tossed aside in the struggle to belong and, at the same time, to cling to ancestral traditions. Agent, Sterling Lord. BOMC selection. (Sept.)