The magic is in the realism

THE ARTS: The Anita Shreve identity sells, and her narrative gift goes beyond 'women's fiction' in increasingly bleak stories. She talks to Anna Mundow at her Massachusetts home

Novelist Anita Shreve sits in the immaculately white kitchen of her immaculately white house in the distinctly white town of Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

On the elegant, tree-shaded street outside, blonde women in gigantic four-wheel-drive vehicles ferry their toddlers home from play-school. It is hard to believe that this was once an isolated settlement known for its eccentrics: Aaron Burt, for example, a local 19th-century hermit who dressed only in sheepskin, and Eleazar Williams, who so strongly resembled the missing Dauphin that he called himself the "Lost Prince" and inspired three popular novels.

That earlier Longmeadow might even have accommodated Anita Shreve's modest fantasy. "I always thought that I would like to live in a town that had a village at its centre, and in that village would be a pub-like thing, so that when you were done working for the day, at five o'clock you would go down there and Ellie might show up, or Maddie. Even if it was only a couple of times a week," she trails off, lifting her coffee cup, "it would be nice."

Ellie and Maddie are Elinor Lipman and Madeline Blaise, writer friends who live in this Connecticut River valley. Shreve is also close to Richard Russo, who, since the success of his novel, Empire Falls, spends much of his time in Hollywood where, Shreve observes, "the money is appealing".

She is not being catty. Shreve's lyrical novels have made her one of the publishing industry's most profitable American writers, but she is as straightforward about her own success as she is about Russo's. "I have a secret desire to write anonymously," she laughs. "Of course you can't do that and make a living."

The Shreve identity sells books. That is why her new novel, A Wedding in December, has a jacket design that is identical to that of previous books such as The Pilot's Wife, The Weight of Water, The Last Time They Met or Light on Snow. They are all pretty, all instantly recognisable.

So much for branding; but what about the product? This is where Shreve confounds those who would instinctively dismiss her novels as "women's fiction". The Washington Post Book World, for example, is forced to conclude that "her secret is that she simply has the Gift - the ability to hook you from the first page, draw you in and pull you along, though you may kick and scream, and not let go until the final word."

That Shreve does this without resorting to the magic realism or New Age mushiness that commonly infects "women's literature" is remarkable enough; that she does so while writing increasingly bleak stories is even more surprising.

"I had a long Eugene O'Neill phase in my formative years," she admits, "and my favourite novel remains Ethan Frome. I mean it's irresistible; you see this ruined man at the outset and you have to know what happened to make him this way."

A Wedding in December, like many of Shreve's books, opens in the shadow of death. Nora, the widow of a recently deceased poet and philanderer, is the proprietor of a New England inn where former college friends of hers have congregated for a wedding. It is December 2001, so there is the larger shadow of September 11th. "The book began in my mind with that freakishly warm December when we could sit outside on the porch," Shreve recalls, "and at that time nobody would sit outside on a porch and not discuss September 11th."

This does not make A Wedding in December a political novel. The events of that day are, Shreve explains, "both peripheral to the book and also at its very core. This is really about man-made catastrophes, big and small. There's the Halifax explosion, there's September 11th, and then there's the mess that some people have made of their lives."

The Halifax disaster, a munitions explosion which occurred in 1917 killing 2,000 people and destroying the city, is the subject of a story which one of Shreve's character's, Agnes, is writing, in Shreve's words, "to make life work out as it hasn't for her".

The hero of Agnes's Halifax novel, Innes Finch, is a young eye surgeon who has recently learned, among other things, how the newly blinded react to their fate. "Innes had hardly ever heard a patient cry out immediately. Instead the mind created images and scenes of how it would be to live without one's sight, to be forever blind, trying it on like a suit of clothes. And then, finally, the weakened limbs, the need to put a hand to a chair for support. Even the youngest and strongest of them walked away as if bludgeoned."

Shreve is too subtle a writer to telegraph the point, but most of her characters fail to see what they most desire until it is lost to them. A Wedding in December, for all its compassion - a notable Shreve quality - is largely a novel about failure, poor timing and missed opportunity. Even the bride and groom have found each other too late for unsullied happiness; she has breast cancer and he has an existing family to placate.

Agnes has for years worshipped the former professor who is now her infrequent lover. Harrison, meeting Nora again after so many years, realises that he is newly infatuated and contemplates leaving his neurotic wife.

"It is a fairly bleak outlook on marriage," Shreve agrees. "It is certainly about the choices that people make and the lives they didn't get to live."

Double lives are as common in her work as are double narratives. In Shreve's best-known and perhaps best novel, The Pilot's Wife, for example, a widow discovers that her husband had a love affair that fatally involved him in the Northern Ireland conflict.

"I like to peel back the layers of a story," Shreve explains, "And that's something you can only do in writing. In life, we keep secrets out of kindness."

It is easy to imagine that Shreve would. She is a courteous and accommodating interviewee, who seems to be more concerned about whether I will encounter flooding on the way home than she is about her "celebrity author" image. She will not talk about the novel she is writing now - she never does - but is forthcoming and unpretentious about her writing habits.

"I could probably write anywhere if I had to. Hotel rooms are great because your real life is completely suspended. If I come over here [ to the kitchen] from my studio there's the mail, there are the dirty dishes, there's my husband with a question, there's the dog. When I go back to the page I'm all frazzled."

She writes every day from early morning to around noon, in longhand, because "the hand seems to slow the thought process down somehow", and because she considers anything that she has written directly on a computer to be "too glib".

Having worked for 15 years as a journalist in New York before writing her first novel, Eden Close, Shreve is accustomed to deadlines and happiest when working.

"I feel as if I pay for my day by writing in the morning. If I don't I feel guilty. And I'm convinced that discipline and routine are the secrets to a happy life. Does that sound pathetic?"

To her affluent young neighbours, perhaps. The Puritan settlers of Longmeadow, on the other hand, would have understood Shreve perfectly.

A Wedding in December is published by Little Brown, £14.99