SOLEDAD

To write the definitive novel of a New York neighborhood can be to strike literary gold—just ask Jonathan Lethem. Washington Heights native and Dominican activist Cruz stakes a clumsy claim to the area with this overwrought first effort. Soledad, a talented young artist on scholarship at Cooper Union, has finally escaped 164th Street for a downtown apartment. When she is called back home for the summer to care for her widowed mother, Olivia, who has fallen into a psychosomatic coma, she is forced to confront the family secrets behind her father's death and her strained relationship with Olivia. Much of the novel is told from the point of view of Soledad's female relatives: her aunt Gorda, a "bruja" (witch) who treats her sister's ailments with home remedies and ceremonies; her cousin, Flaca, a fiery adolescent whose rivalry with Soledad is the main subplot; and Olivia herself, in italicized dream narration and flashbacks. These characters are more interesting than Soledad, a standard-issue "caught between two worlds" heroine, but they are hardly three-dimensional. While Cruz sometimes captures fresh details of behavior and the rhythms of Dominican neighborhood life, she rarely lets them work alone, opting to tell rather than show her characters' psychology in passages that read like particularly banal therapy sessions. The narrative is peppered with cliches: "[W]hen a woman says no, if [men] see a glimpse of flirting or lips that are smiling, no echoes yes, yes if you try hard enough you will get me." Gorda's homespun mysticism is fascinating at first, but by the end it becomes heavy-handed as Cruz strives for a lyrical catharsis she hasn't earned. Readers enticed by a lengthy blurb from Junot Diaz will be disappointed by a melodramatic plot and stale prose. Agent, Ellen Levine.(Aug.)