Slightly Dead Friend, Slightly Dead End

THE EVOLUTION OF JANE

By Cathleen Schine

Houghton Mifflin

$24, 210 pp.

The author of witty and mysterious curiosities, Cathleen Schine, takes an unexpected, wrong turn to the Galapagos Islands with The Evolution of Jane. The existential questioning of the protagonist, Jane Barlow Schwartz, is based on Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. With the additional layering and listing of the names of famous thinkers such as Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, Schine sets out to prove, as she stated in an interview, that she "is a pseudo-intellectual. And [she's] really good at it."

Jane is obsessed and grieving, not over a recent divorce, but about the loss of Martha, her best friend and distant cousin. Martha is not dead, she just disappeared somewhere along the line. Martha was not Jane's friend but rather her idol, the object of her admiration. Jane's chaotic and slightly overbearing mother sends docile Jane into the Galapagos Islands in hopes her daughter will get over the emptiness, where her tour guide is, not surprisingly--Martha! This is not the ending. It is only the beginning of this book that struggles to evolve.

While on the cruise with hundreds of underdeveloped characters, Jane remains pensive about the significance of her lost friendship with Martha. Soul-searching Jane wonders if the disappearance of indifferent Martha is connected with the hushed Barlow family feud. Darwinian theory, the pacific waters and blue-footed boobies are used to speculate answers.

But there are moments when Schine shines. She gives an occasional revelation about self-knowledge and a meaningful insight about the ways woman bond--but these are scarce. Jane believes that Martha gives "a sort of glorious uniform of the soul, new and intricate and ever changing, which [she] could put on each morning without thinking or choosing, which [she] could wear all day and even at night and revel in the pleasure of the fabric against [her] skin, the swirl of the skirts, the elegant shape." These rare and vivid images are beautiful and show Schine's strength as a poetic writer.

It is when Schine returns to the cold, somewhat scientific pseudo-Darwinian logic that she falters. There is an insultingly blatant parallel between Darwin's theory of evolution and the evolution of Jane's friendships and identity. There is no mystery about this self-explanatory connection, but at last Schine introduces a secret family feud. However, the writing again makes any interest vanish. Throughout the novel, the rules of algebra and syllogism appear, "If A=(?) and B=(?), then all one has to prove is (?)." The logic is straightforward, giving the reader time for their own conclusions: if chapter 1=(heavy blinking) and chapter 2=(mind shifting) then all one has to prove is (?). The blending of science and soul does not happen.

Schine leaves us with a paraphrased section of a biology text and a set of journal entries sparkling with banality. At one point, underdeveloped character aboard ship Gloria screams, "Blame it one the stars!" Perhaps they are the culprits. But fate aside, Freud, Marx and all of the jargon undermine Schine's witty prose. As Jane's mother tells her daughter, the reader might associate with the author: "You are a girl of conviction. I admire that."