Imagine Michener’s “Hawaii” as a collaborative effort by Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill. In place of all that tropical grandeur, the book would have seethed with emotional veracity. The grinding details of poverty and cultural oppression could have taken flight in passages of magical realism, informed by a scathingly feminist perspective. That description comes pretty close to Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Hilo books. With “Father of the Four Passages,” Yamanaka continues her chronicle of contemporary working-class Hawaiians. Sonia Kurisu flees a past of abuse and abandonment to settle in the surreal landscape of Las Vegas, where she peddles herself (as an “exotic”) while attempting to create a stable environment for her possibly autistic son. The effort is doomed. Sonia is as haunted as the mother in “Beloved,” engaged in a constant internal dialogue with all the infants she aborted while scarcely more than a child herself. These ghosts drain her, leaving nothing for the living child who needs her so desperately. A return to Hilo is their only hope. Despite Yananaka’s poetic prose, her characters inhabit a dysfunctional paradise as ravaged as any post-apocalyptic battlefield. Not for the squeamish, the book details the bleeding, both physical and spiritual, Sonia experiences in the wake of each abortion. That a novel so steeped in pain and substance abuse, in catastrophic relationships and family betrayals, can ultimately be so full of hope – becoming a tale of reconciliation and forgiveness – is something of a miracle. ( )