Ruth Ozeki: All Over Creation

Reviewed by GERALDINE WHITEFORD

Ruth Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meat, featured a daunting mass of detail on hormones and red meat. My own consumption of meat never quite recovered. In a delightful twist of literary irony, her second novel, All Over Creation, is based on potatoes!

The formula is similar, in that Ozeki seamlessly weaves her careful research on genetic engineering and the cultivation of potatoes into a beautifully crafted story.

The book's central focus is the relationship between Yumi and her father, potato-grower Lloyd Fuller, recently a cultivator of seeds.

When she was 14 years old, Yumi had a sexual relationship with her high-school teacher, Elliot Rhodes, became pregnant and had an abortion. Her father's angry distress ruptured their loving relationship and she ran away. Yumi has since had no contact with her father.

Now, more than 20 years later, her father has cancer and is recovering from a heart attack, while her Japanese mother, Momoko, has early Alzheimer's disease. The neighbours, Cass and Will Quinn, who have bought Lloyd Fuller's farm, are struggling to care for the frail Fullers. Cass Quinn uses the internet to locate Yumi, in Hawaii, and urges her to return to Idaho.

Arriving home with her three children, Yumi meets her father in the rest home. Ozeki exquisitely describes the pain of the reunion of father and daughter. But like the moving patterns of light on the surface of water, the mood of her story quickly changes.

Into the Fullers' lives arrive the Seeds of Resistance, a group of young people committed to ending genetic engineering. Possessing both passion and a dizzying knowledge of genetic engineering (many of the scientific details still elude me), this group is drawn to the Fullers and their seed-nurturing business.

The pattern again changes as Rhodes, the former teacher, re-enters their lives, this time as a PR executive working for a firm that produces genetically engineered potatoes. Ozeki portrays him with mischievous wit and a hint of parody.

She tackles the novel's many contemporary themes with a skilful mix of energy and restraint: genetic engineering, corporate PR spin, sex and abortion, old age, organic gardening, even Bt (the bacterial ingredient in the Painted Apple Moth spray) gets a mention. But uniting Ozeki's story is the constant affection between Yumi and Lloyd as they hesitantly renegotiate their relationship.

Picador, $37.95

* Geraldine Whiteford is an Auckland reviewer.