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Sibling relationships focus on what matters

This is a delicate, humane, funny novel by and about a second-generation Korean American. If you like fiction intelligent, inoffensive, not especially arduous, and with its heart very much in the right place, then this book would make for excellent summer reading.

The strange-sounding title refers to the older of two sisters, Cleo Moon. Soon after she discovers men, sex, and the fact that she is more than exceptionally attractive, she tells her younger sister, Marcy, who has still to discover all these things (and will never discover the last of them) that her name from now on isn't Cleo but Cleopatra. She's already a good deal more famous than the Egyptian queen among the other teenagers in 1970s Washington DC.

The chapters alternate between these years of adolescence and the sisters' adult life some 20 years later. By then Cleo, as she now is again, is burying her husband and is not sure whether she wants to face the problem of bringing up her two children -- Luke, 13, father unknown, and infant June. Perhaps she'd rather paint her lips, get into her Mustang, and go back out on the town

Cleo's career is in sophisticated and expensive bottled sauces with names like Mango Tango Glaze, and when the novel opens she's getting ready for a Global Gourmet Food Show. Marcy, by contrast, is running a second-hand clothes outfit to raise money to build a herbal healing clinic for a community of Native Americans, the White Sky, in Nevada, among whom she for the most part lives, with her boyfriend Pablo.

The two sisters meet up in San Francisco at the funeral. Gradually Marcy finds herself taking responsibility for Luke, who is approaching crisis following his mother's apparent lack of interest in him. Marcy hopes that a trip to Nevada will put him in touch with more serious, primal things than the computer games that, in his withdrawn state, he's become obsessed with. She hopes he'll give up Suicide Spell for the sight of dawn breaking over the desert.

This would be a slightly banal scenario if Cleo was a mere cypher, a foil to Marcy's more sympathetic values. It's true that whereas Cleo has a taste for fast cars and wide-brimmed Hollywood hats, Marcy, with her moccasins and braid, has a mystical obsession with walking. But Cleo is in fact far from dumb. With bronze-dusted cheekbones and smoky kohl eyes, she's alert and aware, and this makes the debate between the two sisters' attitudes to life invariably vibrant and alive. It's the Bible's Mary and Martha reborn, but it was Mary who got to wash Jesus' feet.

Relations between the generations are also intelligently depicted. The sisters' parents have never wholly settled into America. Their mother has not properly mastered English -- her heart is still in North Korea, while her daughters are young Americans. She gave birth to them, but now cannot read their thoughts or their secrets, and cannot understand their songs.

Their father, apparently a good deal more integrated into American life than his wife, is in secret wrestling with a suppressed sense of insecurity and not being loved, a fact he hides by traveling the globe busily as a representative of the World Bank.

Given this kind of set-up, the novel could have gone one of two ways. Either it could have opted for plot complications -- deaths that are more suspicious than they appear at first sight, married bliss that in actuality is based on ignorance, and so on. And there is indeed a phase of this novel when this is exactly what seems about to happen. The other way is for it to get "psychological", in the nicest possible way. And this is the course Frances Park finally chooses to take.

She ends up concentrating her attention on what usually matters most in life -- why people are like they are, what frustrated needs and false perceptions of themselves make them do what they do, and what actions on the part of others can, with luck, go some way toward remedying the situation.

This is the route humane literature almost always takes. It was the route that classic giants of the novel like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence instinctively took, and it will continue to be the way in which the best novels are made.

That said, this is no Mill on the Floss or The Plumed Serpent, though the topics of sibling rivalry and the healing effects of great empty spaces give it a slight relation to both classic forebears.

The author of When My Sister was Cleopatra Moon would, I'm sure, be the last person to claim any exalted status for this modest tale. Even so, her great predecessors would undoubtedly recognize the moral goodness and sanity of what she is trying to say and, though they would be surprised at the short, snappy paragraphs and the lack of any very challenging vocabulary, would probably read the book through to the end.

So, although this novel is in many ways unpretentious and certainly not especially complicated, its author looks at her fellow human beings in ways that makes readers ineluctably feel for them.

It isn't only immigrants who suffer from not having a role, from being unable to adapt, and from wanting not so much to be loved in melodramatic style as simply to be listened to and cared for on a day-to-day basis.

Frances Park has constructed a pleasant and at times charming tale that stands within the best tradition of imaginative writing. Her central character, almost certainly some version of the author herself, refuses to be led astray by fashion or money or a career, and instead looks at what the poet Wordsworth called "the human heart by which we live". As such, the book's influence is certain to be a good one, and we must hope that it succeeds.
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