NEW YORK - In the Hell's Kitchen hideaway the XChange, a hip party venue with a breathtaking view of the Hudson River, literary lion Michael Ondaatje flits among the rest of the pride gathered by his publisher for a Friday-night dinner at BookExpo America - among them Nathan Englander, Mary Gordon, Edwidge Danticat, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
To an omniscient literary eye, the celebrated Sri Lankan/Canadian author of The English Patient (1992) and other lustrous, less famous books, looks mercurial.
A week before, he'd read from his autobiographical masterpiece, Running in the Family, at the rocking, reggae-fueled Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica. Days earlier, he'd been spotted dining in Miami with bookstore mensch Mitchell Kaplan, a major figure in Florida's book retailing trade. His schedule for the next few weeks lists Boston, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Chicago, and New York again.
Yes, it's a book tour, A-List Style, the full Monty, for his fifth novel Divisadero (Knopf, $25), currently drawing raves the Toronto-based author couldn't craft better himself: His own city's Globe and Mail deemed Divisadero "so rich that every description or summary beggars its accomplishment," a "brilliant sleight of hand," a "masterpiece" by a "genius."
"Loved the music!" Ondaatje remarks quickly about Calabash as he says hello to a familiar face and works his way about the XChange. His bright blue eyes, the surprisingly pale face produced by a mix of Dutch, Tamil, Sinhalese and Portuguese ancestry, beguile. His white beard and frizzy ruins of pompadour seem just right for literary eminence.
Yet not everything is perfect in Ondaatje-land. The tour, the celebrity, the freedom, all emerge from that phrase in telling typography on Divisadero's cover: "A novel by the author of THE ENGLISH PATIENT."
"There's a great line by Baldwin," Ondaatje said in an earlier sit-down interview, recalling the great black American writer's uncharitable view of American publishing. "Baldwin said, 'They don't want you to have a career. They want you to have a success.' "
Ondaatje at 63 boasts both. The English Patient, his stellar novel about four war victims suffering together in an abandoned convent, remains the rare case of a critically acclaimed novel (winner of England's Booker Prize) adapted into a critically acclaimed film. For Ondaatje, focus on that book rather than the new one rankles a tad, but he understands.
"I certainly know that's what I'm best known for," he says, "but for me, Anil's Ghost is more recent." He'd like to think his career is about "progression," not a "one-success thing."
"It allowed me to write full time if I wanted to write full time," he says of The English Patient. "It was a kind of gift. You don't want to waste it, you know? It allowed me to write the kind of book I really felt should be written."
By that he means The English Patient didn't drive him to write with an eye to the movies, or, he jokes, "The Return of The English Patient." Books, he says, "are very, very different from film. If I tried to write a book that was a film, it wouldn't interest me at all." His attitude after The English Patient's box-office triumph, he insists, was, "Let me write the next book so that it can only be told as a book. Otherwise, why not just write a screenplay?"
Ondaatje likes literature's ability to frustrate the camera. "My favorite example is John Fowles," he says. Ondaatje describes the British writer as a man who, aside from The French Lieutenant's Woman, "wrote books that were impossible to read, let alone see on film. The Magus? How do you make a film of The Magus?" He notes ruefully that Fowles nonetheless produced "a screenplay of The Magus which was one of the worst screenplays ever written."
In choosing after The English Patient to write in Anil's Ghost (2000) about his native Sri Lanka in the 1980s and '90s, a country racked by civil war - the book (you should know), about a forensic anthropologist, is not in development by any filmmaker - he sought "a much more difficult situation to write about, and to ask people to read. You go that way as opposed to the way you're expected to go. Why bother to write if you're writing for other people?"
Ondaatje's resistance to being aesthetically or geographically pigeonholed has itself become a hallmark of his work. Pico Iyer in the New York Review of Books recently credited him with "trying to create a new kind of mongrel fiction that leaves old categories behind."
"I like that, I like that," Ondaatje exclaims. "I am a mongrel. My books are somewhat nomadic. One book's about Australia, one book's about New Orleans. . . ."
Does he worry that such versatility makes it hard for readers to place him and his work?
"I also react against being a representative," he replies. "Some people like it and that's fine. But I think it's very difficult for some writers, especially if they're from India or South America, and they're living in Canada. They become known to the West as representatives."
The unpredictable narrative of Divisadero, which shares the name of a San Francisco street that once divided the city from fields beyond it (divisadero also derives from a Spanish verb that means "to gaze from afar"), should continue to insulate him from reductive cliches. It displays many of his welcome qualities: a descriptive fascination with unglamorous jobs, a painterly prose full of fresh, imagistic language, a disdain for classical unities of drama.
Set at its beginning on a California farm in the 1970s, about 50 miles north of San Francisco in the area of Petaluma, the novel starts with a widowed rancher raising an unconventional family of sorts: Anne, his natural daughter; Claire, a young woman the same age as Anne whom he's taken in; and Coop, an orphan whom he rescued years before and who has since become his cowhand. When Coop gets too friendly with Anne, violence erupts. Divisadero follows Anne, Claire and Coop 30 years into the future, into worlds of poker and crime research and academe, into the south of France and the mists of literary history.
Several reviewers have commented on its odd structure, particularly a final section that catapults the reader into a completely different literary realm. Ondaatje understands the reaction: "It felt very different to me, writing this book. . . . The structure is quite unusual, to be sure." Like his other books, Ondaatje explains, Divisadero developed without a master plan: As his characters "follow their own interior landscapes, the world gets bigger and bigger and bigger."
"There's a kind of open-door policy in my books," he says with a laugh, "to allow whatever else becomes really interesting to me."
For all his recalcitrance toward writing a book suited to movie adaptation, Ondaatje admits to a fascination with film editing as a model for literary editing. That led him to publish The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film in 2002.
"To me," he says, apropos of the movie world's effect on his fiction, "that's probably the only real influence. The rest is just Conrad saying, 'I want to make you see.' "