1 + 1 Is Less Than 2

By John Elson

THE CROWN OF COLUMBUS

by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins; 382 pages; $21.95

In the making of books, one plus one occasionally add up to less than two. Consider this highly touted first collaboration of best-selling authors -- husband and wife when not at work -- who have an array of awards to their credit. Curiously, the talent pooling has spawned a novel with as much spontaneity as if it had been plotted by computer.

Vivian Twostar -- part Navajo, wholly feminist -- is an assistant professor of anthropology, desperately seeking tenure. As the story laboriously unfolds, Vivian gives birth to a daughter by her once and future lover Roger Williams, poet and English prof. She is a sensual, lapsed Catholic Earth Mother. Roger is Mr. Stuffy: a New England Episcopalian with neat-freak closets and a kitchen full of name-brand gizmos.

Now guess where these two polar-opposite paragons teach. You got it: Dartmouth, veddy Ivy League but founded as a prep school for New Hampshire Indian lads. Their common link, besides furtive lust, is Christopher Columbus. She has been asked for an article on the quincentennial of his first voyage from her people's perspective. He is laptopping an epic poem on the great explorer. In pursuit of Columbus' lost diary, Roger and Vivian fly to Eleuthera in the Bahamas as guests of a junk-bond financier on the lam. This quasi Milken thinks Vivian knows the secret burial site of a golden crown that Queen Isabella gave Columbus. But what if it was a crown of a different kind?

Wild church mice could not drag further clues from this reviewer. Those who care about the answer may want to wait for the movie, which should be at your local plex not long after the paperback edition hits the discount shelves.