TWO FAMILIES, 200 YEARS, ONE SMALL ISLAND

Author: By Marguerite Feitlowitz

Date: SUNDAY, February 22, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

``Eccentric Neighborhoods,'' also written directly in English, is, like its predecessor, a family saga spanning the better part of the last two centuries in Puerto Rico. In addition to the pleasure to be had from the variety of stories, there is a great deal to be learned here about the island's patterns of immigration and emigration, the rise and fall of the sugar barons, rum lords, captains of industry, and their various women. The eternal conflicts over Puerto Rico's legal status -- state? commonwealth? sovereign nation? -- are not merely political dramas here; they play out in the characters' businesses and bedrooms, country clubs, yachts, and bordellos. Ferre has a keen understanding of the subtleties of her country's racial and class divisions, of the mutual needs, betrayals, and intimacies between blood brothers -- hermanos de sangre -- and ``milk brothers'' -- hermanos de leche -- joined through the black or colored servants who suckled their employers' infants as they did their own.

Over the course of 58 chapters, we follow the fortunes of both sides of the narrator's clan, which embraces both the island's plantation aristocracy and hard-driving upstart industrialists. The novel opens and closes with scenes between the narrator, Elvira, and her mother, a formidable sugar heiress named Clarissa. Although this is the relationship the narrator needs most to resolve, by far most of the tales are taken up with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And they are a colorful, poignant lot. There are Clarissa's sisters, all named for literary heroines: Dido, a fragile poet; Artemisia, a business tycoon and religious fanatic; Lakhme, a beautiful divorcee whose several husbands include a clean-cut American, a Muslim who kept a harem, and a cold-blooded Presbyterian; and Siglinda, whose spouse connects the family to the power centers of New York banking and US politics.

Elvira's idealized father, Aurelio, is as talented at business as he is at his Bechstein grand piano, which was transported to Puerto Rico from Germany on the Hindenburg hydrogen zeppelin; after numerous campaigns, he is finally elected governor. Aurelio's brothers and partners in the family empire include Ulises, who is married briefly to a Boston Brahmin suffragette; Roque, who collects relics of the Taino Indian tribe, maintains a secret mulatto family, and eventually commits suicide; and Damian, an ethereally sensitive art collector known in the family as the White Jasmine, who is married to Agripina, a former flapper.

The family saga is anchored to pivotal historical events, including the visits to Puerto Rico of Teddy, and then later, Eleanor Roosevelt, who persuaded her husband to establish a WPA-type program to benefit displaced sugar and rum workers and to jump-start a nascent construction industry (the narrator's family owes part of its fortune to cement). Increasingly the family's well-being depends on good relations with key senators and US schooling. (Aurelio and his brothers all graduate from Northeastern University; Elvira and her brother also study abroad.) However poetic some of the characters may be, everyone in this novel is highly conscious of the stresses, and fruits, of work. The passage of time is marked in part by brand names: Packards give way to Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals; bathrooms have fixtures by American Standard; Elvira and her relatives wear L'Air du Temps, Bulova watches, and dresses by Celia Chapman. We are told the exact amounts of property sales, loans, and rates of interest. We learn about the cultivation of sugar cane, cement manufacture, and real estate.

It is curious that of all the stories in this novel, Elvira's is the most banal. She is brainy but insecure in her ambition, haunted by the constraints traditionally placed on the women of her class. In order to marry, Clarissa relinquished her studies in agronomy, Dido abandoned her art; a paternal aunt, Celia, became a nun so she could travel and work in comparative freedom. Yet Elvira becomes ``the perfect wife'' to a man who is unfaithful and abusive. Elvira's epiphany is a sad one: Having told us frankly that she's always been in love with her father, she must eventually come to terms with Aurelio's deep attachment to his wife, and must liberate herself from his dependent grip after Clarissa dies. Elvira's inheritance from Clarissa -- whose love she came so late to comprehend -- finally allows her to get a divorce and live on her own.

There is an emptiness at the heart of this populous novel. Elvira assuages this loneliness by summoning ``the ghosts who lent [her] their voices . . . and whose stories [she] could not have dreamed.'' She has at last fulfilled her ambition to be a writer. The disappointing irony is that the narrator gets subsumed by her ghosts. Some of these characters appear but fleetingly and for reasons that are more picturesque than vital. It is hard to share the narrator's nostalgia for people we barely come to know. And because we are shuttled from one brief chapter to the next, we get weary of being repeatedly uprooted.

``The House of the Lagoon,'' which centers on the conflict between a husband and wife over the wife's novel-in-progress about family history, has more drama, more narrative drive than ``Eccentric Neighborhoods.'' Because there is little here in the way of suspense, the rhythmic pulse is weak. The final chapters, which contain the narrator's epiphany about her parents, feel rushed. While enjoyable, the novel is at times overly portentous. The author overreaches with epigraphs from, among others, Octavio Paz, Naguib Mahfouz, and V. S. Naipaul, and with some overly self-conscious (and derivative) chapter titles such as ``The I Within the Eye.''

This is a novel that makes its case through the accumulation of detail, a technique that requires tenacity not just from the author but from the reader as well. A book worth its salt is demanding of its audience. Yet one cannot help but want more lasting rewards from ``Eccentric Neighborhoods,'' whose aura, like that of certain flowers, is vibrant but short-lived.