BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Woman’s Journey to Link Her Heart and Her Home : BANANA ROSE <i> by Natalie Goldberg</i> , Bantam, $21.95, 384 pages

In Natalie Goldberg’s first novel, Brooklyn-born Nell Schwartz finds her way to a commune in Taos, N.M., in what appears to be the late ‘60s. Once there, she follows the going trend to shed her given name to become the eponymous Banana Rose. All around her, other hippies are doing the same: Jane Berg has become Happiness, Eugene calls himself Neon, and a pale, red-headed man from Minneapolis named George Howard has christened himself Gauguin.

Banana Rose and Gauguin fall into a passionate, carefree relationship, eventually leaving the commune to set up housekeeping in an adobe shack without indoor plumbing or a telephone. Gauguin is a struggling musician. Banana works as a teacher. Friends can’t phone, so they drop by for sumptuous vegetarian New Mexican meals, impromptu concerts and long nights of dope and talk.

Banana Rose and Gauguin are happy: “Our lovemaking was tender, the way pears lean on each other in a round bowl, and the whole time I heard the bells on Blue’s goats tinkling in the distance. The snow fell and I fell with it.”

Banana Rose would like to be a painter. She sees the magnificence around her and attempts, now and then, to capture it. But mostly she enjoys walking around the dusty plaza in Taos, browsing at the bookstore, savoring fudge from Senor Murphy or malts with her friend Anna, a reclusive writer, at Rexall’s.

Goldberg, who lives in northern New Mexico, allows its raw, panoramic splendor to function like a living, breathing character in the story as well. The spiritual quality of the place, the colors of the earth and sky, the smell of rain, the forked lightning, the shadows on Taos Mountain--none of this is lost on her characters. They appreciate where they are. And they know there is a price to pay for such beauty that most fear they ultimately cannot afford.

But this magical time in Taos is drawing to a close. Anna is the first to leave, feeling the need to connect with her own Midwestern roots (and earn some money). Gauguin suddenly feels trapped in a rut; he’s getting nowhere as a musician and announces he, too, will leave Taos. Banana Rose, who thinks she loves Gauguin more than New Mexico itself, reluctantly agrees to accompany him. They will go to Boulder, Colo., and then to his hometown of Minneapolis.

The grayness and coldness of the North mirrors the emotional weather in the lives of Nell (Banana Rose abandons her Taos name almost as soon as she crosses the Colorado border) and Gauguin/George Howard as they make their way in the “straight” world. They marry, cut their hair, put on suits, ties, slacks, and rent a stark, lower-middle-class duplex. Nell finds a chill in the air, in her life, in her frustrating and sad job as a teacher to the underprivileged. The passion, color and light of the Southwest grow dimmer and dimmer. Yet, at the same time, Nell really begins to paint. She even has her own show in a little student cafe.

Disease, death and a dying marriage become Nell’s ultimate reality in Minneapolis. The breakup of her marriage proves the most wrenching experience she has ever gone through up to that point. She faces a court date and the judge without Gauguin:

“The judge asked me to sit down. I took a seat on his left and looked straight ahead. ‘Now, why exactly are George Howard and Nell Schwartz getting divorced?’ he asked.

“The smell of sage swam across the courtroom. I wanted to tell him that when Gauguin played his silver clarinet, it was like water running in an arroyo, and that he and I had split cedar logs open with an ax, and that the logs had blood-red hearts and smelled like the strong wind.”

Goldberg, the author of “Wild Mind” and “Long, Quiet Highway,” autobiographical books about writing and Buddhism, is an uneven writer of fiction at best. Her carefully orchestrated plot sometimes feels forced in places, yet all the pieces fall together.

She has the hardest time showing us how Anna and Nell are best friends because Anna remains such a nonentity. We never really see her. Their weekend together in a ghostly Midwestern town contains some of the best writing in the book, but it is the haunting emptiness of the town that Goldberg captures, not Anna. This weakness proves to be the novel’s key technical problem, because Anna’s fate is such a vital part of Nell’s story of growing up.

“Banana Rose” is a problematic yet touching novel, awkward in places, poetic and amazingly powerful in others. Nell will find her way home--not to her supportive and beckoning family back East, but to a New Mexico where the playtime is over, and there will be great loss to live with, but where her work as an artist will sustain her better than she had imagined.