In her ponderous new novel, Spark (Coconuts for the Saint) takes on black/Jewish relations in Barbados. Charlotte Lewin is a smart, self-critical 30-ish woman who works at an arts museum in Boston. Asked by her ailing lawyer grandfather, Howard Weinsten, to travel to Barbados to find out who holds proper claim to an ornamented menorah owned by Howard's Massachusetts synagogue, she sets out despite misgivings. Apparently, the menorah had once belonged to a sect of Sephardic Jews in Bridgetown, Barbados; the current synagogue in Barbados wants it back, but the island's Bajan Institute believes it was made by a slave and therefore belongs in a museum. Single, lonely Charlotte, who is reeling from her sister's recent, untimely death, wants neither a vacation nor the responsibility of asserting herself in a strange, hot and seemingly hostile country. But once she arrives, tales of a local ghost intrigue her, while a drunken sexual encounter in a bar bathroom ties her to the son of the local prominent Jewish family, the Lazars. Spark, in a roundabout, long-winded fashion, reveals Charlotte's obsession with her own blankness, and it becomes evident that contact with the inhabitants of Bridgetown—in an attempt to understand their needs—is supposed to cure her of her inner fears. Yet Spark cannot decide whether she even likes her jumpy heroine, and the supporting characters, with the exception of her Barbadan counterpart, the downtrodden Wayne Deare, are curiously uninteresting and unsympathetic. A parachuting accident concerning another of the Lazar sons and rumors of anti-Semitism add suspense, but the island feels airless and excessively manipulated—not a paradise or even a compelling mystery setting. (Sept.)
