BOOK REVIEW : Insight Bubbles Up From ‘Springs’

Springs of Living Water by Karen Lawrence (Villard $17.95; 271 pages).

Min McCune, the independent, strong-minded heroine of Lawrence’s second novel, is a self-taught photographer living somewhat uncertainly in Malibu with her lover Peter, a psychologist.

Though they’ve been together for several years, they’re philosophical opposites. Peter is “earnest, caring. Oblivious. A born Californian.” Brought up on the cold, empty plains of northern Canada, Min has been formed by sterner rules. Peter’s notions of growth, personal space and infinite options are still alien to her; the jargon more disconcerting than reassuring.

Though he’s urging Min to marry him, she’s reluctant to commit herself to someone so utterly different. In her small Ontario hometown, “certain things had been decided long before you were born. . . . You operated from that knowledge it was as common and enveloping as the sheets on your bed, or snow in winter.” Though she’s years away from Wyandotte, that peculiar sense of destiny still haunts her, a feeling Peter cannot begin to understand.

When Min learns from her sister Rina that their widowed father’s health is failing, she sets off on a triple-purpose journey that she hopes will not only supply her with material for her new book on hot springs, but will give her an understanding of her past and a sense of direction for the future.

Packing for the trip, she finds a box of family souvenirs containing a photograph of her grandmother as a lovely and sorrowful young woman. That picture has always haunted Min, and as a child, she imagined an entire life for the grandmother she never met. Sections of that fantasy resurface during the early stages of Min’s travels, providing a counterpoint to the actual narrative and lending the story a touch of mystery.

Alone at first, Min investigates and photographs natural hot springs between California and Ontario, each visit triggering memories of earlier experiences at such places.

These springs function as the central symbol of the novel, standing in for memory. The flashbacks reveal the pivotal events of Min’s girlhood, amusing and tragic in the usual proportion.

When she was barely into her teens, she was taken to one such spa by her mother, already suffering from cancer. In the course of that troubled sojourn, Min formed her first emotional attachment to a fatally ill boy. In recalling that fragile connection, Min begins to understand herself and her ambivalence toward Peter’s being untouched by a troubled past and unable to comprehend Min’s obsession with her own.

Though she finds her father stoically fighting a serious illness, the Wyandotte section is enlivened by Min’s ebullient sister Rina. When the sisters tour Europe together, there are moments of genuine hilarity.

Rina is a natural beauty: impulsive, naive and a perfect foil for Min’s solemnity. The trip includes a journey to Ireland in search of those relatives who stayed behind, an excursion offering further opportunities for personal insight. With little in common except their differing memories of their childhood, Rina and Min grow closer than either of them expected. The new relationship sustains them when they return to find their father’s condition rapidly deteriorating.

Lawrence excels at conveying the texture of provincial Canadian life past and present. Without stooping to condescension, she manages to suggest the essential goodness and the extreme narrow-mindedness of her characters, the best and worst of a heartland no longer remote from the rest of the world but still wary and suspicious of it.

On home ground, Lawrence is assured and deft, but when “Springs of Living Water” leaves its sources behind, the narrative wavers. By experimenting with various fictional tones and techniques, constantly shifting the story back and forth in time and space, the author often sidetracks an already complex theme.

We’ve been taken so far away from Min’s initial concern about marrying Peter that her ultimate decision seems abrupt and quixotic.

Like Min, we’d all but forgotten the demands of the present while submerging ourselves in the depths of the past.