Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje

I have been a bit of an Ondaatje fanboy since undergraduate days, and I would still unreservedly recommend Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion or The English Patient to anybody. I feel a bit more ambivalent about this, his latest, however.

The prose is as pristine and rarefied as expected, and the first half provides us with a gripping plot revolving around the dissolution of a family after a violent incident. To my bafflement however, this tale is abandoned on a cliffhanger and never returned to, and we get an extended flashback about entirely different characters for the last 100 pages. I suppose the idea was that themes and character would resonate between the two sections, but I must be too dim to get it.