Dear Katha,
We seem to be in general agreement about the merits of Blue Diary. Agreement doesn’t always make for lively exchanges, so let me thrash about a little and try to find some tiny area of disagreement. The best I can come up with probably concerns our varying assessments of Hoffman’s storytelling skills, at least as evidenced by this novel. You rate them higher than I.
Unlike you, I didn’t find the book to be a page-turner at all. Despite the surface suavity you correctly adduce, I felt that, from quite early on, there were distressing indications the author was lost, groping to discover a way to proceed, a direction to take.
I’ve had occasion in earlier “Book Clubs” to mention Leopold Mozart’s very useful notion of “il filo,” the thread that, in a successful piece of music, leads logically from the opening note through to the last. It’s a concept that’s obviously applicable not only to music, but to any art that occurs through time, that follows a narrative path. It may be more relevant to literature than to anything else, in fact. When the thread is firmly in place, you sense intuitively that you’re in good hands, that the journey you’re taking, whether immediately pleasurable or not, will get you somewhere that ultimately will feel inevitable as well as unexpected. You get a little click of satisfaction. On the other hand, when the author is improvising, when he or she hasn’t thought through the most basic questions of narrative strategy, a noxious miasma of desperation begins to rise from the pages.
I was finally convinced this miasma was present in Blue Diary when, about half-way through the book, Jorie embarks on her journey to Maryland, decides for no good reason to explore the scene of Ethan’s crime. It’s not merely that this move struck me as psychologically implausible and unmotivated by any established plot necessity; rather, it’s that, having set up a mise en scène and having populated it with a crowd of characters with whom Jorie has relationships, and who themselves have their own stories ripe for development, Hoffman suddenly yanks her protagonist out of that world and starts her up in a new one.
But that moment was, finally, confirmation of a queasy sense that had been gathering force for some time. My first suspicion that we might be adrift in novel limbo occurred quite early, at the beginning of the second chapter. The narration switches from third to first person, the omniscient narrator’s point of view abruptly gives way to that of Kat, a 12-year-old girl who lives next door to Ethan and Jorie, and who has a crush on their son Collie. This device of alternating narrators can sometimes be effective, but more often it isn’t and frequently seems like a pretentious and annoying distraction; indeed, the most famous precedent I can think of, the chapters narrated by Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, mar an otherwise great novel. (Incidentally, Katha, you’re probably right to take me to task for invoking these classic 19th-century novelists, since by so doing I may seem to be establishing impossibly high standards for contemporary popular fiction; but they’re intended as well-known and widely recognized examples, not as some sort of outrageous yardstick. I don’t mean to suggest a writer has to be a Dostoevsky or Dickens in order to be worth reading.) Here, the primary problem with the shift in point of view is that it doesn’t provide anything a third-person narration cannot. Kat’s own story is relatively peripheral and relatively underdeveloped, and the insights into the primary material that her point of view provides are close to nonexistent. She is, of course, a player in the central drama; she’s the person who has alerted the police to Ethan’s whereabouts. But even this datum, despite its potential for fireworks, for teary confession and explosive confrontation, isn’t exploited at all. Her guilty secret stays secret only briefly, her guilt nags at her slightly but doesn’t affect her behavior in any decisive way, and when she admits what she has done, nothing results from her admission. It doesn’t even seem to have much impact on her relations with Collie or Jorie. And it barely informs her narration of events.
There’s another problem with it as well. Kat’s voice itself is thoroughly unconvincing. A 12-year-old girl, even a precociously intelligent 12-year-old girl, simply doesn’t write like this: “Some people believe that if you don’t open your eyes to sorrow and you don’t talk about it, you can pretend it never happened. You can go on about your business and not even notice that a year has gone by, time enough for there to be nothing left except heartbreak and bones.” Or this, about her sister, “There was always self-interest when it came to Rosarie, the selfish beat of her own cold heart.” Did the resemblance strike you too, Katha? The prepubescent Kat writes almost exactly like … the grown-up Alice Hoffman!
So apparently neither you nor I enjoyed this book, and we’d both advise Slate readers to give it a miss. Well, let me point out the silver lining: It’s a pleasure to learn we agree about it.
All best,
Erik
