(“And then one day,” one typically fizzy passage goes, “at the northwest end of the subocean rupture, an eruption of liquid rock occurred that was different from any others.”) James Michener, on the other hand, wrote way too much: His 1959 novel “Hawaii” covers nearly the whole thing, from the volcanoes to the missionaries, a span of 40 million years, or maybe pages, it’s hard to tell. But what little they wrote about Hawaii was fictionalized, heavily metaphorical and is now mostly forgotten. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and Herman Melville passed through on their way to other frontiers. Hawaii has seen its share of famous storytellers. It means having the right guide, a writer to annotate the loveliness. This is what separates Hawaii from the beach-and-beer nowheres like Fort Lauderdale and Cancun: a complicated soul.įinding it means getting out of Waikiki, peeling back layers to uncover the stories behind the scenery. Hawaii’s blandly sunny face hides a turbulent history, an extra dimension of sadness and beauty. “Well, this is nice, but is this all there is? Is this it?”Īctually, it’s not. They seem contented, but a half-formed question lingers in their eyes: David Lodge noted this in his satirical novel “Paradise News,” imagining the predicament of tourists in fanny packs walking up and down the sidewalks of Waikiki like heavenly pilgrims with no place left to go. Like any paradise, Hawaii walks the fine line between blissful and boring.
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