Compass of the Heart: A Novel of Discovery

The familiar scenario in which a shared passion overleaps racial bounds gets an unconvincing, New Age face-lift in Cogan's disappointing second novel (after Winona's Web). We first meet Meggie, a white psychologist in her 40s, on her knees, praying with a sacred pipe given to her by the same aged Native American woman who trained her lover, philandering Lakota medicine man Hawk. From the beginning, it's clear who'll be making most of the adjustments in this relationship--but it can't help but raise eyebrows when Meggie prays for the spiritual health of the woman who is her rival. Is it white guilt that makes Meggie open herself so thoroughly to the spirituality of sweat lodge ceremonies and vision quests? (The closest Hawk gets to her culture is baking nut bread and playing golf.) Or is it that Meggie, with her education and European blood, can afford to make herself available to other cultures, while the red man she loves is more primally bound to his own? The novel is too sentimental to address such questions, and the everyday doings of the characters never quite hold our attention. Who can care about (or believe in) a woman who, when she learns that her lover has been shot, blurts out: ""Oh jeez, I hope I didn't have anything to do with the shooting. You see, I left him a note, a love letter. What if his wife, Andrea, found out about us?"" The ring of human speech is as absent from Cogan's dialogue as hard questions are from the minds of her characters. (Oct.)