There are writers able to create the same world consistently, invariably populated by the same group of misplaced, love-lorn and life-wary individuals, without ever quite repeating themselves or falling into the trap of self parody. Alice Hoffman is a writer capable of endless and often complex variations of given themes. Her novels are similar without being the same in their concern with the ordinary, laced with surrealist flourishes and elements of the traditional European fairytale.
Hers is a Yankee version of magic realism. Even at her most strange, she remains a romantic possessing a dark side. She is also, for all the ease of her prose and heavily descriptive style, shrewd, even tough. She is always practical, a natural moralist aware that love and humiliation walk hand in hand. In ways Hoffman is a good witch, she is certainly a fine, at times, inspired storyteller. Her books, from her debut, Property (1980), White Horses (1982), Fortune's Daughter (1985) and on through Illumination Night (1987), At Risk (1989), Seventh Heaven (1990), Turtle Moon (1992), Second Nature (1994), Practical Magic (1995) and Here On Earth (1997) are tales; more fable than easy romance.
The River King is her 14th novel and is, as expected, a rich, layered story. The setting is familiar: small-town New England and her approach to creating a dense background of local shopkeepers, divorcees, and loners is as all-seeing as ever. Hoffman walks close to the cosy and acknowledges its appeal without straying into it. On one level her books are quest novels, a combination of Emily Bronte crossed with John Irving, except that Hoffman is superior to Irving. Gardens and kitchens, knowing animals and complicated children who have been lost and found, have always enhanced the texture of her fiction.
The detail, which could be overwhelming, and at times almost is, is deliberate. She wants us to believe in the community she is creating, and we do.
As ever with Hoffman there is a large, perhaps too large, Balzacian cast. Yet Hoffman's characters, even the stock ones, are interesting and even the "good" guys are not always perfect.
Aside from the town of Haddan, which provides the central canvas, much of the action takes place at an expensive local private school that has never won the approval of the native citizens. As the plot develops, Hoffman deliberately sets these two spheres against each other. But if the town is the real world, the school is the stage for the acting out of not only the crime at the heart of the novel, but of the several conflicts of emotion and trust.
FOR all the modernity of her voice, Hoffman is a traditionalist. Her portraits of contemporary east coast American life are often superimposed upon the history of a place. This awareness of the past often provides Hoffman with a subplot, and it does here. The sad life a young woman, Annie Jordan, "the most beautiful girl in the village" who was once unhappily married to the maverick headmaster of Haddan School, is the fairytale backdrop against which the narrative takes place.
Annie is the first outsider at the school; though she is not a pupil, she does introduce the theme of outsiders and misfits. The lovely Annie has left more than a tragic story behind, there is also the legacy of the gardens she created. The rose becomes a ruling motif in a narrative which cleverly moves back and forth among several main characters with the deftness of a team tennis match with all players on court.
While Betsy, an unlikely new recruit to the Haddan School staff, is forming a sort of friendship with an ageing but still formidable history teacher, the once beautiful Helen Davis, a new pupil arrives. Carlin is 15, clever, a good swimmer and desperate not to replicate her mother's messy life. Naturally, Carlin is also beautiful and meets up with the doomed Gus Pierce, another misfit. The stage becomes very crowded when Hoffman introduces another misfit, Abe, a good-looking and single policeman. In contrast to the snobbish history created by the school, Abe represents local history in ordinary time.
Part of Hoffman's strength as a novelist is that she can control her story-telling sufficiently to allow her characters speak among themselves. Dialogue always counters her natural tendency to resort to subplots and stories within stories. She also enjoys having her characters slowly unravel the mysteries she confronts them with, as in this case, a death in which the victim remains central to the narrative. It is also interesting that she decides not to develop the selfish Betsy as a sympathetic romantic heroine and instead shifts her interest, and that of the novel, to the complex Carlin, whose defiant streak helps elevate her beyond her stereotyping as the clever, beautiful, ambitious child of poverty.
There are losses and deaths and mistakes. Hoffman's idea of a happy ending is usually more to do with lucky escapes than redemption, but never mind. Equally, her male creations are invariably a mixture of rogue and mush, with the occasional Christfigure. Still in the character, and more importantly, experiences of young Gus Pierce she explores the black side of human nature.
This latest novel is certainly Hoffman at her most familiar, but as that familiar is also shrewd, intelligent, kindly and humane, it is not a disappointment. The River King casts a textured spell that may not completely beguile but always convinces.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of the Irish Times
