Katha,
Most bad novels reveal their flaws quickly. The writing is usually inelegant, the characters crudely drawn, the dramatic situations clunky, the dialogue stilted. There’s no obvious reason why these seemingly unrelated deficiencies of craftsmanship should all share space within the same piece of work, but it’s striking how often they do.
That isn’t the case with Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, Blue Diary. Although it’s a genuinely bad book, it doesn’t send up these traditional early warning flares. On the contrary, it’s clearly the work of an accomplished writer, consistently demonstrating a respectable level of skill. I’m not a fan of the prose, which tends to rely excessively upon descriptions (often unadorned catalogs) of flowers and birds, and to my ears strains toward the lyrical but merely achieves the twee: “In the morning, when Rosarie finally gets out of bed, she combs her hair. She yawns, and doesn’t notice what falls out from among the strands: fireflies, petals, white moths, heartache.” Or, “Now she cries for herself, and she’s shocked by how much salt water there is contained within her. She could collect buckets of it, wash her clothes in it, boil a sour teary tea that could bring grief to the drinker with a single sip.” No, this sort of thing isn’t my cup of sour teary tea, but still, there’s no denying it’s the work of a professional. Similarly, beyond the level of the sentence and the paragraph, the individual scenes, taken in isolation, are decently constructed. And a few of the characters have some minimal life to them. This is a book that meets, even if it does not exceed, its technical obligations. Its failures, in other words, while pervasive, take some time before they force themselves on one’s attention.
Nor does the problem reside in the book’s premise, which could easily have generated a good novel or even a great one: Jorie Ford discovers one morning that her perfect life in a small Massachusetts town is built on an awful lie, learns that her handsome, loving husband, Ethan, a perfect father, a pillar of the community, a popular Little League coach and impossibly brave volunteer fireman, had some 13 years previously raped and murdered a young girl and has been living under an assumed name ever since.
It’s a premise that by its very nature raises questions of guilt and redemption, existence and essence, mask and identity. Or so one would think. Just imagine what a Dostoevsky could have done with such a situation. Whereas Alice Hoffman–? Well, frankly, she doesn’t do much of anything. There are some Peyton Place-like doings among the townsfolk (if one were inclined to be charitable, one might call them Our Town-like doings), romances beginning, friendships ending, serious illnesses announcing themselves. But there’s very little that persuasively relates to or illuminates Ethan Ford’s plight. Ethan himself virtually disappears as a character very early on, languishing in jail and all but abandoned by his family (and by his creator). One would expect that confrontations between Ethan and his wife, Jorie, would be at the very heart of the book, but in fact, they barely occur at all. Instead, Jorie, the novel’s protagonist, soon goes on a long (and unconvincingly motivated) journey of discovery to the scene of the crime in order to arrive at the earth-shattering realization that rape and murder are very bad things and can cause lasting damage.
What’s lacking throughout is psychological nuance, moral complexity, some willingness to explore and dramatize the situation Hoffman has herself created. If, for example, she had chosen to have Jorie stand by Ethan and then gradually understand she is letting herself become complicit in a monster’s elaborate deception, that might have been an interesting and plausible development. If, alternatively, she had had Jorie reject Ethan and then find herself forced to come to terms with the possibility he is now a changed man, a different person from the one who committed the crimes, that, too, would present a provocative quandary for her protagonist to confront: How do you define justice in a case like that? Can someone be held accountable for heinous acts committed by an earlier, jettisoned self? But such questions are barely even raised, let alone explored. We are told, repeatedly, that Ethan has been leading an exemplary life for years, but no important plot consequences follow.
Speaking as a writer rather than a reader, I find the wasted potential incomprehensible, and more poignant than anything within the pages of the novel itself. It’s like a version of Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov barely appears, in which the inner workings of his soul play no part, written solely to express the author’s condemnation of urban crime. Why bother? It would have made more sense to write a novel about the modest dramas of small-town life and omit Ethan’s story altogether.
A word about the blue diary from which the novel takes its title: It’s the victim’s diary, saved by her younger brother, and vouchsafed to Jorie as a sort of token of trust. It makes its first appearance about two-thirds of the way through the novel, sits unexamined in Jorie’s purse for another 100 pages or so, and then (by way of an arbitrary and improbable plot contrivance) is unlocked so that Jorie can read it. Here are the only words quoted from it: “I met the handsomest boy in the world today. We went swimming. He kissed me more times than I could count. Kissed at last. Hurray!” There’s no denying that the last written words of a 15-year-old victim of a violent crime are bound to be touching, but still, granted the heavy freight, both symbolic and narrative, the diary is forced to bear, this hardly seems sufficient.
Tomorrow, among other things, I want to address the puzzling intermittent use of a first-person narrator, but I’ve probably gone on long enough for today. Besides, I’m curious to hear your reactions.
Best,
Erik
