THE WOMAN IN GREEN

A group of seekers attempts to resurrect an old utopian community in Lockridge’s comic novel, the fourth in a series.

In the year 2050, an unnamed researcher presents his findings regarding the various utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana. The researcher is an “adjunct assistant clinical instructor of post-millennial studies, Wabash College,” who happens to have been born at the exact moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He is also the grandson of Sam Coverdale, founder of the most recent of these failed communities, a 1999 venture meant to achieve a convergence of all knowledge called the New Harmony Institute. Though many specialists were involved, the seven key players—according to our narrator—include two couples—the scientific Schillers and the artistic Gordons—plus the Gordons’ daughter, Allegra, Coverdale himself, and Coverdale’s “psychologically damaged” son, Hartley. In their attempts to avoid the mistakes of the previous utopian communities on the site—which were organized by a German zealot and a Welsh industrialist—the hapless Coverdalians uncover an encoded scroll at the bottom of a labyrinth, host a mammoth pageant, and discover a plague that might very well wipe out all of the world’s trees. Mostly, though, these aging intellectuals’ combustive interactions force them to consider the timeless inscrutability of marriage, parenthood, suicide, and life on Earth. The author’s madcap prose is as breathless as it is colorful. One chapter begins: “While others met to lick wounds at Le Pool Hall, Allegra sped in the Pathfinder to the shrine of the Dalai Lama’s brother, a few miles south of Bloomington. She was bewildered to find the shrine surrounded by thirty-three men in red fezzes peddling mini-cycles in intricate circular patterns.” The novel contains several layers of storytelling, and its mysteries take a leisurely approach to revealing themselves. There’s more play than plot, perhaps, but nearly every page is ripe with humor, literary references, and sincere questions about how we should be living.

A playful, postmodern exploration of the allure and limitations of utopia.