It mostly works, thanks to Davenport's passionate conviction and her masterly ability to evoke the social and physical topography of her native Hawaii. The opening pages, set on Oahu's Waianae Coast in 1964, vividly depict a majestic terrain dotted with 'ancient ruins, sacred heiau (shrines), prayer-towers, and sacrificial altars.' It is also 'a place of hopelessness, a coast of broken, thrown-away lives,' according to angry young Anahola, who abandons her 4-year-old daughter, Ana, and flees to San Francisco.

Ana grows up in a community 'circumscribed by landlessness, poor education, drugs.' She's nurtured by relatives who draw strength from the timeless rhythms of rural Hawaiian life, though they are scarred by a modern world that offers them only the bleakest possibilities. Generations of men have come home mutilated from America's wars; beautiful, tempestuous women bear children who seldom know their fathers. Ana's two favorite cousins seem likely to continue this grim trend: Lopaka enlists in 1968 and heads for Vietnam; Rosie, lame from the beatings of her abusive mother, gets pregnant at 21. Rosie makes Ana swear to complete her education: 'We got to break the pattern in this family,' she says. 'You're going make this family proud.' Ana goes to college and then to medical school, sullenly rejecting her mother's intermittent attempts at reconciliation.

Their fraught relationship and Ana's conflicted feelings about her heritage would be ample material for most novelists, but Davenport aims to do far more. She breaks away from Ana's story at intervals to develop two parallel dramas. In San Francisco, Anahola falls in love with Max, an immunologist who sends her to college and helps her build a new life. And in the forests of northern Russia, the author introduces us to Nikolai, son of a prisoner in one of Stalin's labor camps. After his father dies and his mother is arrested, 9-year-old Nikolai scrambles for survival on the desolate streets of Leningrad, then is sent to a state school in Moscow.

It's a long way from the frozen Soviet wastes of Nikolai's childhood to the Pacific vistas that enfold Ana and Anahola, but the three odysseys slowly intertwine to reveal Davenport's central preoccupation. Max tells Anahola that he is dying of cancer caused by his exposure to radiation years earlier when he was a physicist at Los Alamos. Nikolai discovers his vocation as a filmmaker documenting Russia's toxic industrial pollution, cause of hideous birth defects and debilitating illnesses the government tries to hide. Ana joins Lopaka in protests against the U.S. military's use of the Makua Valley, a site sacred to native Hawaiians, for aerial bombardment and other 'war maneuvers.' References scattered throughout the novel to Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and skyrocketing cancer rates drive home the author's point that industry and the armed forces are recklessly contaminating our natural resources and that the worst consequences of this heedlessness are suffered by the powerless.

This is a lot of freight for one novel to carry, particularly when it's also crammed with information about traditional Hawaiian religion, childbearing practices and healing techniques — not to mention a lot of agonizing by a heroine so traumatized by childhood loss that she's not sure she can deal with true love when she finally finds it. Ana's romance with Nikolai is never as compelling or as believable as her wonderfully complicated bonds with her kin, and the couple's ecstatic reunion in Helsinki features dialogue so highly colored as to be dangerously close to ridiculous. ('We will laugh at the past, carry it like a white rose in our teeth.') Yet only the most cynical reader wouldn't want a happy ending for people who have known so much sorrow, who are striving so wholeheartedly to bind up the world's wounds as well as their own.

A desire to make us see the connections between personal and global damage fuels all of Davenport's fiction, and if this desire often pushes her toward excess, it also gives her books an appealing warmth and fervor. Her regrettable lack of discipline is, if not quite redeemed, then at least overwhelmed by her ferocious commitment to her characters and themes, her magical gift for bringing to life landscapes as varied as Kauai's enchanted beaches and Kazakhstan's blighted rivers. Anyone willing to see through her eyes for several hundred pages will find 'House of Many Gods' a powerful and moving experience." Reviewed by Wendy Smith, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)