Review: 'The Way Forward' leaves you standing still

"The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart"
By Alice Walker
Random House
Nonfiction/Memoir
224 pages

By Sheana Ochoa
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- A writer writes for herself or for others. These are not mutually exclusive, but when she writes only for herself, the material comes across as esoteric and ambiguous. Alice Walker's "The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart" has this quality of being impenetrable. Walker presents us with a indecipherable series of sketches, introducing new characters, returning to seemingly old characters with new names, and plunging the reader into a new set of circumstances that are never resolved.

Just when we begin to feel comfortable with one story, begin to care about the characters, we are pulled into a new scene that will be torn away as quickly as the previous one. Walker presents these new characters as if we already know them, which makes it difficult to identify with them.

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Often she will introduce a character with similar traits, such as the women who talk to "grandma," an alter ego. One senses the need to relate these characters to one another and yet there is no other connection between them. Finally, the reader is left feeling "out of the know," as if there is a secret being hidden.

One might argue that in this way the book more accurately reflects life: unpredictable and misleading. Indeed, the first part of the book is called a "Memoir of Marriage," and as a memoir, whose very form is elusive and undefined, one expects a break from traditional story structure and goal-oriented characters.

Memoir is a literary genre with few "rules," where in stream of consciousness and absence of plot are accepted if not expected. However, without the presence of characters with which a reader can identify and travel, a book becomes frustrating and disappointing.

This in not to say the book lacks moments of brilliance and candor. What happens is the moments flicker out too soon and aren't rekindled or reconnected to satisfy the reader or even warrant the original flame.

On one page Walker addresses her "young husband," on the next she addresses the reader in a cryptic retelling of the marriage that went wrong (and yet we never really discover how). Suddenly we are then pulled into an unspecific time and place with new characters such as Rosa who is obsessed with her married lover, Orelia, who does not love her husband anymore, and Auntie Putt Putt, a rape victim. Each of these characters is interesting, but unexplored and unconnected.

The one constant of "The Way Forward," which almost haphazardly opens and closes the book, is Walker's memories of her "magical" marriage of ten years -- a marriage that ended in divorce. The marriage is to a man of a different race, a theme that sets the tone for the entire book: the problem of being black in America.

Walker touches upon this theme from various angles, including the concept of interracial marriage, the tragedy of being trapped in another person's (white) language, and even a guilty enjoyment of a piece of watermelon.

But as fascinating as the subject matter is, the reader is still left aching for story. In the end, "The Way Forward" leaves you standing still.

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