Birds of Paradise: A Novel [Anglais] [Relié]

Tolstoy said, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In Diana Abu-Jaber's fourth novel, the Muirs of Miami are a deeply unhappy family. The tale is set in the days leading up to daughter, Felice's, 18th birthday. Her mother, Avis, is a talented pastry chef, running a high-end bakery out of their home. Her father, Brian, is a successful real estate attorney. And at 23, her older brother, Stanley, is running a business he's passionate about. These are privileged people with every reason to be content, but when Felice was only 13 years old, she ran away from home. She didn't run far. She's still in Miami, a "beach kid," sleeping outdoors or squatting in houses. But there's been virtually no contact with her family since she left, and it's torn them apart.

This is not a story of abuse or addiction--although there is abuse and there are drugs in her story. No, Felice was a supremely lovely and loved child being raised by flawed, but essentially good, people. And part of the suspense of the novel is the motivation for Felice's actions. No one can understand why this young girl went off the rails. At one point her father asks himself:

"What. What should he and Avis have done? Put their girl's face on a milk carton?
Missing: Felice Muir, Age 13.
Kidnapped by herself.
Motivation: Unknown
What child does such a thing as that? Could she have been that unhappy?"

The story is told in chapters that alternate between Avis's, Brian's, and Felice's points of view, until Stanley has his say near the novel's end. Based on this overly simple summary, Birds of Paradise sounds like a Lifetime original movie. Nothing could be further from the truth! Diana Abu-Jaber is a lush, evocative novelist capturing subtle emotions and interplays amongst her characters. There is all the grief and confusion you would expect of a family in this situation, but beyond the family unit, there are dangerous friendships and complicated interactions. There is so much happening on so many levels.

Abu-Jaber captures the atmospheric otherness of her setting. ("She remembers how Hannah hated everything about Miami--even some of the best things, like the hooked-nosed white ibises roaming around in the grass and the flowers that blew up into winter foliage--a tree or bush opening overnight into flower like perfumed flames.") And not just the exotic physicality of the place, but the uneasy clash of cultures. ("She'd felt disorientation strong as vertigo after they'd first moved to Miami--as if her magnetic poles had been switched. The drivers were appalling, punching their horns, running reds, cutting each other off like sworn enemies. There were certain shops and restaurants one would not wish to enter unless one spoke Spanish--and not at her halting, college intermediate level, either. There were whole neighborhoods and sections of town where she felt scrutinized and sized up. How many times had she waited by counters while salespeople went in search of `the one' who spoke English?")

Another reviewer described the novel as layered, and that is apt. On the surface, you have the story being told, the family drama. But in other layers, you've got the all kinds of subtext--the psychology of the characters, the social commentary, the time and the place. And there are external stressors ratcheting up tension as the book progresses: a husband's temptation, the danger of the streets, financial crises, and physical jeopardy.

The language is as sumptuous as the rich desserts that Avis creates, and fans of the author won't be surprised by the attention she lavishes on food within the text. Again, beyond mere description, the reader must ponder what is being said about sustenance, nurturing, creativity, privilege. The novel's opening sentence reads, "A cookie, Avis told her children, is a soul." Things are often more than they may at first seem in Abu-Jaber's adept hands. A cookie is more than a cookie, and a family is more than the tragedy that defines it.

There's not much backbone here on which this author can hang her lush prose and unusual imagery. Other readers have pointed out how hard it is to swallow many of the central and peripheral elements of this plot, but there's also a coldness--not only in Felice, but also in Stanley and Nieves--that's alienating. Even at the end, Felice leaves the reaching out entirely to her mother. It's hard to care about characters who demonstrate their capacity for caring only to a select few.

Abu-Jaber's provocative portrait of a Miami family is as rich and fragrant as the Florida landscape, as fascinating as the diverse culture and a testament to the author's maturity as a writer. Expanding her love of food and its deep connections to family and identity, the author positions the Muir family amid the lush vegetation of a lovely home, a mother's kitchen palace of sugared confections and the hollow echoes of devastating family loss: Felice has inexplicably run away from home at thirteen, her eighteenth birthday looming; Stanley has foregone an expected college education for his dream, a sustainable food co-op; Brian is an attorney for an avaricious Miami developer; and Avis seeks refuge in the perfection of her specialty desserts, artistically rendered- and expensive- much in demand by high-profile customers. Felice rarely makes contact, Brian and Avis at odds with how best to survive their beautiful daughter's defection; Stanley has claimed his own future, with a girlfriend who sets Avis's teeth on edge with her air of self-possession.

In succulent pieces, like bites of Avis's delicious creations, we learn the particular flavors of each family member, Brian in his ivory tower of privilege, surrounded by the arrogance of an acquisitive corporate culture, flirting with his fading youth and loss of focus, Stanley fighting to keep his financial enterprise afloat and Avis spinning a flurry of sugar and flour, the ingredients of a magical world, as fleeting as her dream of a perfect family and as elusive as the heart-stopping screams of a neighboring mynah bird, whose sometimes plaintive cries mimic the lament of a lost child. Saddest is the impulsive Felice, her beauty bestowing a false sense of security, driven from home by a secret that has seared her spirit to a more fragile and marginal existence with other runaways who squat in vacant mansions, as careless of their own histories as the places they disdainfully inhabit. What seems an intimate family drama is, in fact, a far-reaching indictment of societal isolation, political violence and the loss of identity, a vista surrounded by both beauty and decay, cities overrun in a clash of poverty and gentrification. As internally storm-tossed as the approaching Hurricane Katrina that will spill them all upon less familiar shores, well-tended lives will be eviscerated by the truth of their impoverishment.

Abu-Jaber captures it all in a mélange of private revelations, self-doubts, unexpressed yearnings- and for Felice, a life and death decision. Avis and Brian have separate epiphanies, Avis profoundly affected by Solange, her Haitian neighbor, who reluctantly draws Avis into a charmed circle of otherness, tragedy and excruciating insight, her exotic adjoining garden as mysterious and fecund as Solange's heartbreaking story. Tormented, Felice wanders a trash-strewn beach, all momentarily forgotten in a drugged haze until violence teaches her the fallacy of her own logic ("For years she assumed that the worst possible thing has already happened."). The author's vision has expanded over time, become more universal and accessible, the plot building slowly, but gaining in intensity like Katrina, as satisfying as Stanley's life-sustaining staples and as ethereal as Avis Muir's sugared confections: "Minds and bodies tell one story... but the now burns everything in its oven." Luan Gaines/2011.