Birds of paradise

MIAMI comes alive in "Birds of Paradise," a lush new novel by Diana Abu-Jaber, the author of a culinary memoir ("The Language of Baklava") and three previous novels ("Arabian Jazz," "Crescent" and "Origin"). From the verdant streets of Coral Gables to the back lots of Little Haiti and the seedy underbelly of Miami Beach, the metropolis is floridly; meticulously detailed. Its every breath and scent, its hallucinations, its beckoning torpor, the ambitions and accents of its inhabitants become as impossible to resist as a postprandial siesta in the tropics. ("Hurricane season. The trees have grown dense as rooftops; the plumerías hold their flower-tipped branches up like brides with golden corsages.") These luxuriant atmospherics are backdrop to the story of the Muirs, a fractured, afflicted, hapless - that is to say, sadly typical - American family. There's Brian, an Ivy League-educated real estate lawyer whose growing disaffection with his life has him flirting with a sexy Cuban colleague and potentially ruinous financial dealings. His wife, Avis, is an imperiously Gallic-style baker for whom perfect millefeuilles are akin to religious transcendence; the physicality and perfectionism of her work serve to imperfectly insulate her against the burdens she carries. Their son, Stanley, the most stoical and neglected of the clan, owns a trendy organic grocery south of the city. And then there's the ethereally beautiful Felice, approaching her 18th birthday as a longtime runaway on the streets of Miami Beach, and around whom much of the novel's action and emotional preoccupations revolve. "Birds of Paradise" unfolds in a round-robin of uneven chapters, each told from the point of view of one of the Muirs. Felice hijacks the novel from the rest of her family. Her chapters are the most riveting, spiky with details and edged with almost unbelievable danger. In contrast, the other characters feel stilted, forced into stale life. The father's midlife crisis. His and Avis's strained marriage. Stanley's determination to forge his own path after his sister's disappearance, which renders him nearly invisible. Perhaps this makes sense. The family's shattered existences are all they have left to pick over after Felice inexplicably takes off at age 13. A solar system without her at its white-hot center, it seems, is a grim galaxy indeed. As we struggle along with Felice's parents and brother to make sense of her vanishing act, we can't wait to get back to Felice, to roll along with her on her beat-up skateboard ("the board is the best place for her to be, her head empty and clear, ... the street rumbling through the wheels under her feet"), meet the other sassy "outdoor kids" and the boy who loves her and may just save her ("She feels sorry for him, he's such a transparent, white-guy color"). We anxiously accompany her as she drops acid, considers modeling jobs, wakes up on the beach after another night of drinking and clubbing, gets into cars with the wrong kind of people. An interminable 61 pages separates Felice's first chapter from her second, and nearly 50 come between her second and too-short third. In between, the novel plods on with her family's soul-searching and late stages of grief. Her mother's despair is measured by the steady thwok of her wooden mixing spoon, the rolling out of sugar crusts, the daylong labor of gâteaux St Honoré. But no matter how luscious the descriptions of her pastries - and they are mouthwatering - Avis comes across as brittle and self-contained. There is no real sense of her mothering, only of her loss and a kind of martyred narcissism. Even a brief connection with a mysterious Haitian neighbor is mired in dialogue stiff as overly beaten egg whites: "Sugar is like a compass," the neighbor says. "It points to trouble." At times, the pile-on of descriptions and metaphors (in Avis's sections especially) render the novel's images hazy, as if they'd been faded by too much sunlight, by Miami itself. Or the prose overheats to the point where even a delivery boy can refer to voodoo as "religion with extenuating circumstances." Occasionally, Abu-Jaber offers sharp insights about her characters, describing Avis as someone who "knew all about beauty and almost nothing of utility." Brian's discontent is "a gradual, almost metaphysical condition, seeping in, mineralizing his bones." While the Muirs strive to come to terms with Felice's disappearance, sifting through anger, resentment and plain hard work, after five long years, they are dazed and depleted, victims of her absence. In chronicling the loss of one teenager and the lonely bitterness left in her wake, Abu-Jaber seems to suggest we are much diminished without our "beloved missing." That said, the impetus for Felice's radical departure (even for a radical adolescent) remains frustratingly, teasingly out of reach for most of the novel and strains credulity once we learn it. Felice stubbornly lives out her gritty existence as a solemn oath of self-punishment, one she never speaks of (that's part of the penance). She has missed out on high school, lives only a few miles from her parents, yet somehow manages to stay relatively safe, and is still gorgeous enough (we're told over and over again) to be a perennial candidate for modeling jobs. Are the stakes any higher because Felice is so beautiful? While Avis tried furiously to track down her daughter and now very rarely gets to see her, the family's resignation, however uneasy, is hard to swallow. In the end, the indisputable stars of "Birds of Paradise" are Felice and Miami itself, with its obliterating light, its "perfumed flames" of vegetation, the grand theater of its skies, its "ranning currents of Spanish." Miami and Felice mirror each other, getting under our skin, making us sweat to soaking. Abu-Jaber has captured Miami's insiders and outsiders, the ordinary and the outlandish, the hype, the hurricanes, the hoopla. This, perhaps, is her greatest achievement in a novel of mixed success. A family's shattered existences are all they have left to pick over after a daughter runs away. Cristina García's most recent novels are "The Lady Matador's Hotel" and "Dreams of Significant Girls." She is a professor of creative writing at Texas Tech University.