Allende quits magical realism for a bodice-ripper romance

In her latest novel, "Daughter of Fortune," Isabel Allende has abandoned the magical realism that animated her acclaimed first novel, "The House of the Spirits" (1985), to write a conventional historical drama -- one of those event-crammed sagas featuring a beautiful, plucky heroine, a mysterious, elusive lover and a cardboard supporting cast of thousands.

The resulting book reads like a bodice-ripper romance crossed with Judith Krantz, with plenty of feminist and multicultural seasoning thrown in to update the mix.

The heroine of "Daughter of Fortune" is a familiar type: an orphan taken in by a wealthy family and brought up to be a proper lady. Her path toward respectability, however, takes an unexpected detour when she meets a handsome young man with a dangerous sexual allure.

The heroine is a pretty young thing named Eliza, who is discovered one morning in 1832 in a soap crate outside the door of the Sommers family mansion in Valparaiso, Chile.

When Eliza is 16 she meets a moody young man named Joaquin Andieta whose lower-class background makes him an inappropriate suitor in her family's eyes. Like so many other socially mismatched couples in Allende's fiction, the pair soon fall madly love and begin meeting in secret. By the time Eliza learns she is pregnant, however, it is too late: Joaquin has left home to join the flood of Chilean fortune-hunters journeying north to California in search of gold.

Daughter of Fortune
By Isabel Allende. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. HarperCollins, 399 pages, $26.

These developments, of course, provide Allende with a springboard for a series of crises, melodramas and catastrophes. Eliza decides to follow Joaquin to California and stows away on a ship. It's not long before she has become severely ill and suffers a miscarriage that nearly claims her own life. She is saved by Tao Chi'en, the ship's cook, who conveniently happens to be a doctor skilled in the use of Chinese herbs.

Throughout the novel Allende uses Eliza and Tao's adventures as an excuse for hackneyed historical observations about the gold-rush madness of the 1850s -- much the way she used her hero's peregrinations in "The Infinite Plan" (1993) as an excuse for clichéd remarks on the 1960s. Her descriptions of the greed and lawlessness of the California frontier feel perfunctory and secondhand, as do her predictable paeans to the opportunities afforded immigrants by the United States.

She crams this novel with feminist lamentations on the deplorable state of women's rights during the 19th century, but does little to dramatize her feminist sentiments. Her people are simplistic and trite: evil outlaws, greedy opportunists and whores with hearts of gold. Eliza may evolve from a hapless victim into an independent-minded dreamer, but she never becomes more than a paper-doll figure of womanly survival, just as her friend Tao remains a cutout symbol of Eastern mysticism and wisdom: a pair of two-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional book.

Isabel Allende reads from "Daughter of Fortune" Monday at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street. Tickets $5 at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., 206-634-6600.