The Write Line

Where characters lead, author Michael Ondaatje follows

The more one talks to Michael Ondaatje about the way he writes his novels, the more one is drawn toward a simple, cautionary conclusion: Kids, don8217;t try this at home.

Ask the author of The English Patient, Anil8217;s Ghost and the just-published Divisadero if he has ever worked from an outline and he bursts out laughing. 8220;I did try once,8221; he says. 8220;I wrote a kind of treatment.8221; But it destroyed his enthusiasm for the material: 8220;So I said, 8216;Now, why would I want to write that?8217; 8221;

Many writers start novels without knowing precisely where they8217;re going. But when it comes to improvisation, Ondaatje is an extreme case. 8220;I move things around,8221; he explains 8220;till they become sharp and clear, till they are in the right location. And it is at this stage that I discover the work8217;s true voice and structure.8221;

So he does have an outline.
Writing like this is a high-wire act whose results can be both spellbinding and disorienting. Take Divisadero. The new novel began when, as a visiting writer at Stanford, he fell in love with the rugged, rolling hills north of San Francisco. Imagining an 8220;odd kind of family8221; in that landscape, he says, 8220;became the book.8221;

But a little more than halfway through, the action shifts to France, with a new set of characters. Ondaatje had no clue when he started writing that these French people would show up.

When he wrote The English Patient, he used the same intuitive, build-from-fragments technique. For something approaching a year, he didn8217;t know who his title character was. Two major characters wandered in, unplanned, from his previous novel. That particular improvisation, published in 1992, won the Booker Prize and became an Academy Award-winning film. It made Ondaatje 8220;more than reasonably famous8221; and endowed him with the financial independence to write books any way he chooses.

There8217;s a kind of controlled wildness to the appearance of the author. Blue-eyed, white-bearded, his uncombed hair seeming to rise straight from his head, he evokes, at 63, a combination of Prospero and Lear. He was born in 1943 in Sri Lanka. His Dutch name on-DA-chey comes from an earlier generation of colonisers, but his complex ancestry includes multiple nationalities, among them Sinhalese and Tamil. He left for England at 11, and in his new surroundings, literature felt intimidating8212;8220;it was Keats and Shelley and, blah blah, blah, T.S. Eliot8221;8212;that he was 8220;terrified to even think of being a writer.8221; Canada changed that.

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Ondaatje took the title Divisadero from a street in San Francisco. 8220;I just love that name,8221; he says. The book is finished now8212;and yet: Can the creative process ever really end for Ondaatje, insatiable improviser, perpetual hunter for the right accidental notes? The answer is in his attitude toward rereading his books.

He never has. 8220;I should read them someday, and learn something,8221; he says. 8220;But I8217;d probably want to rewrite them.8221;
Bob ThompsonLAT-WP