Teens fall for promise of spirituality

Emily Temple’s book, “The Lightness,” places a group of wounded and ornery teenage girls at “a panspiritual contemplative community” retreat in the mountains, where the gardener is a man-bun-sporting slice of heaven named Luke. What could go wrong?

The narrator, Olivia, arrives at the Levitation Center for its annual summer program aimed at young women whose families despair of their behavior — or, as is Olivia’s case, just want to unload their daughters for a month or two. After her father disappears, Olivia runs away, “if you can really call it running away when you leave plain tracks and credit card receipts and no one bothers to come after you.” As it happens, Olivia’s father is a dedicated Buddhist and devotee of the Center who believes it is one of the only places in the United States where meditation-induced levitation is possible.

Luke has supposedly achieved levitation, and so Olivia and the friends to whom she becomes attached — Laurel, Serena, Janet — circle around him, at first cautiously, then with abandon. Temple makes this melodramatic trope work thanks to her unusual, clipped and very funny style. “Men are always comparing naked women to other things,” Temple writes, “as if our exposed flesh is too bright to be experienced without simile. As if bare breasts won’t blind you if they’re cans, cantaloupes.” She’s a gifted writer and storyteller with an unwavering command of her plot.

The plot she’s chosen remains melodramatic, however: Hormone-drunk adolescents fall for something part-spiritual, partmagical, and go too far — way, way too far. When Olivia’s attraction to Luke grows, but she finds out he is tending someone else’s garden, she begins to see her friends as rivals instead of companions.

All will be revealed, which readers know because an adult Olivia is narrating this tale with years of hindsight and more than a little ruefulness. “Does this constant tracing and retracing make me less the witness, or more?” she wonders. “I mean, I have to do something, even after all this time.” After going over the events of that summer again and again, she has learned, supposedly the hard way, that believing too much in any one thing can break your heart. That lesson doesn’t amount to much for the reader, though, despite all the promise of Temple’s immense talent.