REVIEW 'Now is the Time' loses reader in muddled story

By MOLLY KNIGHT
BALTIMORE SUN
"Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart," by Alice Walker (Random House, $24.95)
On the first day of her trip down the Colorado River, Kate Talkingtree -- the protagonist of Alice Walker's 10th novel -- asks: "Who would she be at the end of this journey?" The question sets the stage for a work touted by Random House as one woman's "spiritual adventure, quest for self and collision with love." Instead, with its disjointed narrative, distant characters and internal musings, "Now is the Time" reads more like psychic self-help.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for "The Color Purple," Walker is a longtime peace activist, Buddhist and seeker of spiritual clarity. Never before, however, has she used fiction to delve so single-mindedly into the world of meditation, shamanism and other self-help techniques. In doing so, the talented, prolific writer -- much like her protagonist -- seems to have lost her bearings.
Disillusioned
At 57, Kate is disillusioned and dissatisfied. Despite her success as a writer and her relationship with a doting painter named Yolo, she is "no longer sure there was a path in life."
One night, Kate dreams about a dry, sand-filled riverbed. When she wakes, she realizes that her internal dry river is "unconnected to a wet one on Earth." A few pages later, Kate sets off on a three-week journey down the Colorado River with a disparate group of women -- all of them searching for something.
Like the rapids of the Colorado, the book soon becomes choppy and difficult to follow.
When she's not on the river, some of Kate's most revelatory moments come when she is sick to her stomach, an experience she finds cathartic: "A lot of my past lives came up, literally, in vomiting."
When she's not sick, she sits around the campfire with her female companions talking about love, sex and growing old.
Radical decision
At the end of her trip, Kate returns home to Yolo. Instead of embracing life with him, Kate delivers a surprising blow: She has chosen a life of celibacy. A few days later -- with little explanation -- she takes off again, this time to the Amazon with a sundry, disaffected cast of characters. At the same time, Yolo hops a plane to Hawaii.
Deep in the Amazonian rain forest, Kate attempts to heal by ingesting large amounts of "yage," a hallucinogenic root given to her by a shaman named Armando. She falls into trances during which she communicates with her spiritual "Grandmother." A psychedelic drug, the yage also triggers several more episodes of vomiting: "She saw that even though throwing up itself is revolting, she had, after many sessions with Grandmother, learned to do it well; almost elegantly."