"Birds of Paradise," by Diana Abu-Jaber

Diana Abu-Jaber’s new novel, “Birds of Paradise” (W. W. Norton, 2011), shares with her other novels the starring role of food, especially baked goods, in her characters’ lives. One of the main characters in this novel is the baker of delicate, intricate, artistic pastries that taste ethereal as well as delicious; another runs a grocery store specializing in local, seasonal, organic food. But the main theme of the novel is the mysterious estrangement between parents Avis and Brian, on the one hand, and their daughter Felice, on the other hand. Felice had been close to her parents and to her brother Stanley until about age 13, when she started periodically and then finally disappearing from her home. As the novel begins, Avis doesn’t know where her daughter lives, and only sees her every few months when Felice calls and arranges to meet in a café, where she sometimes is very late and sometimes doesn’t show up after all. There are alternating chapters from the points of view of the four family members. In Felice’s chapters, we are soon given hints that something bad happened at school or with a school friend, something that Felice cannot forget or forgive herself for, and this is connected with her leaving home. This story reminds me a bit of several novels with runaway daughters, including the wonderful late Carol Shields’ moving last book, “Unless.” There is the same sense of bafflement and grief felt by the parents, the wondering what they did wrong, what they could have done differently, and the aching pain of missing and worrying about their estranged daughters. I have to mention too that this novel is set in Miami, and to a greater degree than with most novels, the city is almost a character in the novel. We watch the four main characters and a few others move through the city; the city and its neighborhoods come alive in Abu-Jaber’s descriptions. We see the physical beauty of the beaches, water, and vegetation; we see the glamor and glitz of the city, along with the tawdriness and greed. We see the mixture of people from many backgrounds, and the large amounts of money being spent everywhere, especially on real estate, in this just-before-the-bubble-burst era. I happen to have visited Miami for the first time this past June, so I was particularly interested in the vivid descriptions of the city. Hurricane Katrina is also a character in the novel, and its aftermath plays an important part in the resolution of the story.