Wild Onions

Set in 1970, with flashbacks to 1941 and flashforwards to 2038, Andersdatter's lyrical second novel (after The Doorway) follows the hypersensitive residents of the small community of Bolagues in Northern California's Marin County as they try to make sense of a chaotic world that is always at war or plunging its innocent inhabitants into future shock. There's more gestalt than story, as Andersdatter throws in newspaper clippings about Vietnam, Nixon, Reagan and various other predations made by the cruel world into the vulnerable psyches (and, occasionally, bodies) of her characters. Mad Twyla Two Dog Flannigan roams the countryside and sleeps, when the mood strikes her, in the Olsen barn. Ingrid Olsen, shy widow and daring painter of nude men, is seduced by Danny--whose never-to-be-divorced wife lives back East with the children. Jake, Ingrid's childhood friend, hovers nearby, if needed. Murray Goldstein, a comically pretentious psychiatrist and volunteer fireman, labors painfully to fit into the community. When free spirit India Mulland passes through, her affair with Murray lands the psychiatrist in therapy. Lil, Twyla's mother, whose tortured journal excerpts illuminate her daughter's madness, and writer Anna Delatorre, whose memoirs form the final part of the book, provide the private records of the times. Andersdatter's prose is at times quite graceful, especially when it cleaves to the rhythms and epiphanies of everyday life. It's when she looks beyond the quotidian, however, that she stumbles, opting for passionate assertion rather than sustained dramatization, as if she didn't quite trust readers to feel the poignancy of the tale on their own. (Jan.)