Alice in Wonderland
Alice Hoffman's new novel, "Blue Diary," opens on a nice day - no, "a brutally gorgeous morning ... on a glorious day" with a "brilliant sky" in a "peerless month" full of "glittering sunlight."
"This is the season when even the most foolish of men will stop to appreciate the creamy blossoms of hollyhocks and English daisies." This is writing that will make even the most foolish of readers want to brush their teeth. But we're not off the first page yet.
We have to meet Ethan Ford, the eugenic hero Hoffman creates by crossbreeding Superman, Jesus, and Brad Pitt. "He's a man of his word, as dependable as he is kind.... He's an excellent carpenter, an excellent man all around; a valued member of the volunteer fire department well known for his fearlessness; a respected coach who offers more encouragement to some local children than their own parents." He helps out at the senior center and never turns a friend down for a loan.
And, of course, he's the most handsome man anyone has ever seen, unless you read Hoffman's previous novel, "The River King," whose hero was, up until this time, the most handsome man anyone had ever seen. But "Ethan is the sort of man who doesn't seem to be aware of his own good looks," perhaps because he enjoys the benefit of not having everything explained for him the way we do in this novel.
He loves his beautiful wife "desperately," and why not? Jorie laughs "the sort of sweet laughter that summons the sparrows from the trees." "Their union" - you guessed it! - "was a miracle
of sorts." When they walk through town, adoring neighbors stare at them "as though bewitched" or call their names from passing cars.
But, rats, if only Ethan hadn't raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl. That's the sort of slip that can ruin your whole day, no matter how the sunlight glitters off the hollyhocks.
When a strange little girl next door recognizes Ethan's mugshot on a most-wanted TV show, his horrible past finally catches up with him. In a moment, the perfect world collapses. Jorie must decide how to live with the knowledge that she never really knew her affable stud muffin. And their son withdraws into a cloud of angry disillusionment.
A chilling flashback describes the night a drunken young Ethan seduced his victim and killed her. Standing over her body, he's overwhelmed by the responsibility of what he's done. "He could feel his old self sink into the field as he walked away, and the person he was about to become rose up to enter into the same blood and bones." Now, 15 years later, Ethan claims he's prayed for forgiveness and he's no longer that man.
Weirdly, the town believes him and rallies around their favorite neighbor in a plea to let bygones be bygones. Stuck in their own bad marriages and flabby bodies, they need Ethan to be flawless, but we never really get to see him. He remains the Ken doll at the center of these complex moral issues that Hoffman paints in pastel colors. We're asked not to look behind the curtain of his transformation, even though that's the engine that powers everything here. This is to novel writing what alchemy is to chemistry.
What makes this central failure so unfortunate is how moving many of the side scenes are, once we get away from the good/evil Ethan Ford and his perfect/ruined family. As she showed most recently in "Local Girls" (1999), Hoffman is a master short story writer. The scenes in which Jorie and her best friend comfort each other in the shadow of their private disasters are beautifully, graciously handled.
Hoffman is particularly astute in her portrayal of teens dealing with family grief and illness. The young girl who lives alongside the Fords has acquired a creepy kind of precocity by watching her own father sicken and kill himself. The chapters she narrates run with anger and envy, till finally a sediment of compassion begins to collect in her mind. Having seen how quickly and cruelly the wheel of fortune can spin, she attains a kind of hard realism and self-confidence. She's resigned herself to the inconstancy of the world, but she deserves a better novel than this to inhabit.
Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments to charlesr@csmonitor.com.
