In Fine Form

If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with “The Color Purple,” it’s hard to imagine how it could have been published.
“Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart” is a remarkably awful compendium of inanities. There are New Age inanities: “She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives.”
Feminist inanities: “She had seemed to feel, and to wonder aloud, about the possibility that only women, these days, dreamed of rivers, and were alarmed that they were dry.”
Flower children inanities: “What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain?”
And plain old bad writing: “The moment I stood in front of any one of his paintings, she elaborated, my bird nature became activated. I felt I could fly!”

La Kakutani reviews Alice Walker’s latest book, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart.