Freakish circus goes Latin in America: 'The InfInite Plan' - Isabel Allende Tr. Margaret Sayers Peden: HarperCollins, 14.99 pounds

A JAPANESE artist who arrived in London to paint Hyde Park would very likely come up with a fragile watercolour of delicate cherry trees, with perhaps a simple wooden bridge over the water and a few slim, curved figures with tiny mouths walking in the distance. A British artist in Japan, meanwhile, might well make the gardens of Kyoto look like Virginia Water. Both artists would swiftly relate the trees they saw to techniques they trusted and aesthetic assumptions they had inherited.

Verbal brushstrokes rarely seem so culturally specific, but Isabel Allende's new novel raises plenty of interesting questions about the relationship between a prose style and its immediate subject. The Infinite Plan is set in the United States, yet it is composed in a gorgeous, breathless key we associate with novels from Latin America. Ever since Hemingway, the prevailing idiom of American literature has tended towards simplicity, so it is startling to read about an American life in a novel dominated by extravagant emotions and colourful Spanishy contrasts.

The Infinite Plan charts the career through life of a gringo called Gregory Reeve. When the book opens, he is travelling across America in a caravan with his father, a freelance evangelist whose private bible, the 'infinite plan' of the title, is an admirable, if eccentric, moral text. During his sermons, Gregory's father drapes himself in a boa constrictor, and nobody minds admitting that the snake is the main attraction.

The family settles in a Californian barrio and Gregory grows up in a violent, heated world of Hispanic migrants. His 400-page search for love and self-knowledge leads him through the promiscuous hippie culture of Berkeley in the Sixties, the Vietnam war, and two unhappy marriages. All along, he is sustained by his friendship with Carmen Morales, his intense, sisterly confidante in the barrio. At night the pair of them curl up and lick dabs of sticky, sweet condensed milk from each other's fingers.

It is a long and busy saga, narrated with a zest we can hardly help savouring as peculiarly Latin American - even in translation. Here, for instance, Allende describes Gregory's first taste of school.

'The boy's knowledge was out of the ordinary: he could recount the plots of operas, describe landscapes from the National Geographic and recite Byron's verses; he knew how to bag a duck, gut a fish and in an instant could calculate how far a truck would travel in 45 minutes if it was moving at 30 miles per hour - none of which had much application in his new situation. He knew how to get the boa into a sack but could not go to the corner to buy bread; he had never lived among other children or been inside a classroom; he knew nothing of children's cruelty or of impassable racial barriers . . . The colour of his skin and his absolute lack of malice irritated the other boys, who jumped him whenever they could, usually in the bathroom, and pummelled him until he was half stupefied. Not always the innocent one, he often provoked confrontations. With Juan Jose and Carmen Morales, he invented gross practical jokes, such as using a syringe to remove the mint from chocolate bonbons and then to fill them with the hottest salsa from Inmaculada's kitchen; they then offered these treats to the Martinez gang: Let's smoke the peace pipe and be friends, OK? After that trick, they had to hide for a week.'

This is a style some readers will be tempted to finger as magic realist: full of exhilarating clashes and beguiling details that wrangle pleasantly with the melancholy cadences in the undertow. American life is not usually described in this way, and it is easy to recoil at once, and say that style has triumphed over content.

But why should a literary style be chained by geography? It is commonly asserted that the more fantastic elements of magic realism are not really fantastic at all because, like, if you ever go to Peru, right, I mean the life there is just incredible, OK, like totally unreal . . . . But even the most devoted admirers of, for instance, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and Isabel Allende is one of these) learn less about Colombia from his novels than they would if they jumped on a plane and went there for a few days. If magic realism means anything, it refers to uncannily plausible, rapt accounts of supernatural events - Kafka's The Metamorphosis, for example. Novels such as Allende's, which merely relate life in a highly charged and lyrical way, are not the same thing at all.

Besides, as The Infinite Plan proceeds, it becomes obvious that North America (especially California) has been waiting for someone to catch its drift in such expansive, tropical paragraphs. Mad evangelicals, weird science, greedy lawyers, dippy herbalists, noisy soldiers and comfortable bourgeois rebels . . . these are usually seen in political terms, as participants in a culture of protest, whichever side they are on. Allende sees them from farther off, and depicts the whole shebang as a freakish and ludicrous circus.

Better still, all of this stuff is only the backdrop to an eager journey into the affairs of the heart. Saul Bellow once said that in erotic matters America was a Third World nation, and Allende explores the amorous travails of her characters with terrific poise and gusto. For a long while the novel seems to be built on Dickensian lines: it is clear to the reader that Gregory Reeve must be mad, in seeking happiness with an assortment of ill-suited women, to overlook his superb childhood sweetheart, Carmen. Surely he will come to his senses in the end. But even here Allende provides a bittersweet twist.

At its worst, The Infinite Plan obeys too many of the dictates of soap opera: mothers perish in the bath one minute, boys are raped the next, daughters are molested by their fathers, teenagers fall in front of trains . . . the immense pageant sweeps on, magnificent but soon forgotten in the rush. There is, in the novel as a whole as well as in its individual (English) sentences, a sense of closure. The reader is addressed by a voice that would not be out of place in a lecture hall: polished, massively confident, certain of everything. After a couple of hundred pages crowded with furious incidents - soldiers dying in the hero's arms, lovers buckling under the strain, dodgy malpractice suits bringing bankruptcy to well-meaning men - you can't help thinking: isn't anyone baffled by any of this? How come there are such assured explanations for everything that happens?

But The Infinite Plan remains a work of tremendous and ingenious vitality. Allende rarely states anything without giving equal weight to a contradictory truth. A rich layabout pours scorn on every idealistic impulse, but secretly donates huge sums to good causes; a slender vegetarian has occasional binges on greasy pork chops; a caddish fixer turns out to have a heart of gold; and so on. The reader can only reel. Whether the novel is real or not seems almost beside the point.