om love

An idyllic romance choreographed in yoga poses is the basis for this sophomoric novel from Minot (The Blue Bowl). Billy Winslow, a New York City artist whose career peaked in the %E2%80%9880s, now spends the majority of his time practicing yoga. As he tracks the downtown yoga studio RamAnanda through its incarnations in various venues, Billy falls in love with the beautiful yogi, Amanda. The chemistry between the two borders on nauseatingly perfect, until Amanda receives a devastating diagnosis and the relationship starts to fall apart. These romantic vicissitudes are played against the backdrop of turn of the millennium New York, with memories of the recent Dot-com bubble grimly countered by the sobering 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately, in Minot's hands these quintessentially American themes and experiences suffer from what Billy calls "wordpainting," a prose tactic wherein long strings of adjectives and nouns are linked together in order to create an impressionistic narrative that too often reads like fictionalized slam poetry. The result is something like a sermon delivered by a sex-obsessed Hare Krishna with the emotional sophistication of an adolescent boy. (Aug.)