I am pleasantly baffled by "Sarah Canary"

Sarah Canary ****1/2
By Karen Joy Fowler

On the surface, "Sarah Canary" is a picaresque, episodic novel in which three characters--Chin, a Chinese immigrant; B.J., an escaped mental patient so emotionally erased that he no longer has a name, just initials; and Adelaide, a women's rights activist, chase the mysterious title character in the Pacific Northwest in 1873.

The theme of each chapter is introduced by a kind of historical introduction. For instance, Sarah Canary is committed to a mental institution at one point, and that episode is preceded by a short discussion of how madhouses were funded and operated at the time. This structure will be familiar to readers of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime."

But where Doctorow's novel is essentially historical fiction, meant to tease out the great themes of twentieth century America, Fowler seems to be trying to say something about myth and story.

Sarah Canary is scarcely a real person, simply someone whose erratic journey takes the characters in circles as they try to sort out fact and fiction. Within each episode, someone tells a story, and someone else recognizes the basic elements of the story. Chin's story about a goddess who seduces humans into a night of love that lasts 100 years resonates with B.J. as the story of Rip Van Winkel.

What do these stories mean? Can they be understood in some universal way across personality and culture? And why do we tell them?

Chin, who eventually returns to China, writes:

We imagine ourselves as creatures of destiny. We listen to stories and forget that the listening also tells the story. The story we hear is ourselves. We are the only ones who can hear it.

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story. They all tell us that nothing is meant to be.

That nothing is meant.

That nothing is.

They tell us nothing. We dream our little dreams, dream that we are dreamers--while all about us the great dream goes on. Sometimes one of the great dreamers (i.e., Sarah Canary) passes among us. She is like a sleepwalker, passing without purpose, without malice or mercy. Beautiful and terrible things happen around her. We discern symmetries, repetitions, and think we are seeing the pattern of our lives. But the pattern is in the seeing, not in the dream.

We dare not waken the dreamer. We, ourselves, are only her dreams.

"Sarah Canary" offers a fair amount of insight to anyone reading Fowler's later and more well-known novel, "The Jane Austen Book Club." In that novel, characters are almost but not quite reflections of Austen's own heroines. But the fates of Fowler's characters owe less to the fates of their counterparts in Austen and more with the way they themselves interpret the stories of their Austen doppelgangers.

In other words, Austen is the story, and the characters listening to the story tell the story. The story they hear is themselves.

OK, so all of the above sounds kind of half-baked the way I tell it because I'm just not that Zen, but "Sarah Canary" bears re-reading and re-thinking, all the while being a really engaging story on the surface.