Struggle for a life on Kaua'i

By Ann M. Sato
Special to The Advertiser

Dan O'Connor, a lawyer who practices both here and in California, set out to write a novel about political corruption in the miniature hotbed of the Kaua'i County Council. But, as happens when the writing is going as it should, his characters had other ideas.

Political corruption remains at the center of O'Connor's newly published novel, "Sugar," about a young woman, Kalili'i "Sugar" Kaleo-Owens, who rises from poor beginnings to become the mayor of Kaua'i.

Taking office with the best of intentions, the bike-riding, development-opposing, flower- and holoku-wearing mayor finds herself embroiled in a bribery scandal that, by the time the courtroom action ends, tugs free every secret, knotted cord of her life.

Darker themes than bribery emerge: child sexual abuse and domestic violence. And though O'Connor says he had not begun the book with any conscious intention of seeing his heroine affected by these all-too-common societal problems, "The stage was set, and when I added that element, the scene and the story exploded."

O'Connor, a graduate of the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and a participant for the past five years in Maui Writers Conference workshops, has wanted to become an accomplished writer since childhood.

A resident of Danville, near San Francisco, he and his wife discovered Kaua'i on their honeymoon in 1981 and now divide their time between California and Kaua'i.

"Sugar" is the first of what he plans as a series of novels – there are six in various stages of completion. Among them is a plantation-era work exploring the lives of some of Kalili'i Kaleo's more colorful ancestors.

(Kalili'i, by the way, does not mean "sugar," but "tiny, dainty, fine.")

O'Connor's stated intention is to write works that deal with "serious and meaningful issues in an entertaining and contemplative manner." He has certainly done so here.

"Sugar" touches on pretty much every key theme in Hawai'i history: the erosion of the Hawaiian culture, its renaissance and the prospect of Hawaiian sovereignty; racial tension; political power-mongering; inequities in the class-ridden plantation system and their continuing effects on the Islands, both socially and economically; land development and ecological issues.

All these play out in the contemporary history of Kaleo's family: her disenfranchised and disturbed father; her mother, the compass of the family, lost in a drowning accident; her wise auntie, laying low in a Quonset hut in the country; her alienated older brother, dead in Vietnam; her coquettish sister, a suicide; her young brother, unemployed and looking to his big sister for help.

Finally, there is Sugar/Lili herself, a woman some may have difficulty accepting. Readers who have not known a true survivor – someone who has been through so many insults and indignities that it's a wonder they can put one foot in front of the other each day Ü may not believe that any-one could make a life from the tattered remnants that Sugar is allotted.

It's easy to question her choices, chiefly her almost inexplicable marriage. And when you list everything that happens to her in the course of the book, from the early loss of a beloved parent to prostitution by blackmail, her life begins to seem awfully bleak.

But there is joy here, too, in a mother's love and the way that a family pulls together in the end. Throughout, this smart, grounded, determined woman is an inspiring, if flawed, figure, as O'Connor intends her to be.

Some, despite the headlines and TV movies and documentaries that chronicle these truths, may not believe that the sexual abuse could happen as it's painted here. The experts, and those who've been through it, know it could.

And does.

Despite O'Connor's skill – particularly in weaving the action back and forth in time and craftily keeping some key mysteries shrouded until the denouement – I did argue with this book, and stumbled occasionally over certain of the author's choices.

It bothered me throughout that, although the action spans roughly 30 years, from the '60s to the '90s, the flavor of the book was more the '30s to the '60s in its references to the power of the Big Five, its prominent haoles running other's lives; the whole novel felt like one of those movies where you're in present time but all the rooms are dimly lit and decorated in a period style designed to throw you back to a previous era.

O'Connor acknowledges there is a certain romanticism to the Big Five era that he wanted to hint at, especially for Mainland readers.

Still, no one who enjoys historical fiction, especially that set in the Islands, or who cares about the issues at stake here, will want to miss "Sugar."

O'Connor has met his goal of writing very readable work about very difficult issues.

Ann Sato lives in Kailua; she has been reviewing books for The Honolulu Advertiser since 1999.