Dear Erik,
Once I found a novel by Alice Hoffman in the laundry room of the building where I live. I picked it up and opened at random: A teen-age girl is dying of a dreadful disease; she looks in the mirror and is pierced with happiness because (I more or less quote from memory) “she realizes that she would have been beautiful.” That’s Alice Hoffman–awful things happen to nice people, the writing is fluent, punctuated by little flashes that are odd and piquant and astute, the story moves right along, and there you are, weeping among the washing machines. There is a reason why Alice Hoffman, who has written 14 novels, is rich, famous, and beloved by legions of readers!
I agree with your criticisms of Blue Diary, and yet I kept reading–Hoffman has a real storytelling gift, even though, in this book, there’s almost no story: I kept thinking some ingenious plot reversal was about to occur–Ethan had killed more people, Ethan is found not guilty and everyone but his wife thinks he’s innocent, Ethan turns out to have been a major bastard all along, none of which are very original, I realize, but I’m not the novelist here. The book is written with total confidence, ease, and drive, as if it were full of surprises just about to burst onto the page–after all, the basic situation owes much to the mystery story, the thriller, and the Gothic. So I kept turning pages, waiting for I knew not what, past botanical descriptions, evocations of small-town doings, thumbnail sketches of various marriages and friendships and teen-age troubles, all moderately interesting (except for the botanical descriptions, which I found repetitious and cloying) but hardly enough on their own to keep one fascinated. But in the end it’s all just what it looked like it was going to be from the beginning: Long ago, the perfect husband had committed a rape-murder and that was a flaw that could not be overlooked, even by a wife as besotted with her husband as Jorie.
Perhaps the problem with Blue Diary can be expressed another way: Except for Kat, the clever but unhappy neighbor girl who turns Ethan in after seeing his picture on a TV crime-stopper show, the characters are too stupid to make anything of their narrative situation. Take Jorie, for instance–she barely has what I would call a thought. At crucial moments, instead of grappling with the situation before her, she is having mental images of lilies or blackbirds. No wonder it didn’t strike her as odd that Ethan had no relatives, no old friends, no past. I mean, you fall in love at first sight with a drifter in a bar, and when you say you’re going to marry him, even your mother doesn’t say, gee, honey, when do we get to meet his parents? It’s obvious that Ethan is hiding something and almost as obvious that he’s living under an assumed name–in the real world, where we’ve all read lots of mystery stories, we recognize the signs instantly. Similarly, there are suggestions from the beginning that there’s something controlling and selfish and too needy in Ethan’s uxoriousness. I wondered about the love scene that opens the book, in which Ethan comes home from a morning errand and urges Jorie back to bed, even though she’s standing up her best friend Charlotte and he’s leaving his co-worker Mark waiting outside a locked house that they are renovating together. Not every wife married for 13 years would think that rush of desire was so innocent.
You mentioned Dostoevsky, which is a little unfair since not too many novelists, even very wonderful ones, could bear up under that comparison. But it does call into question the basic donnée of Hoffman’s book: that a man could be “perfect” now–great husband, wonderful father, good friend, stand-up craftsman, honest businessman, kind and patient and loving not just to his family but to the whole town, where he regularly saves lives as a volunteer fireman–although 15 years ago he was a self-important, cruel, narcissistic no-account prone to petty crime and outbursts of violence. Even Jean Valjean, to pick another classic, didn’t change as much as Ethan–and poor Jean was only a petty thief, not a sex-murderer. Moreover, Jean begins his transformation when the saintly bishop refuses to have him arrested for stealing his candlesticks: That act of humanity and trust calls forth Jean’s own potential moral greatness. Ethan, by contrast, rapes and kills (well, the other way around, actually), meticulously hides the evidence, and all we are told is “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.” What the heck is that supposed to mean? Hoffman tells us he is “good at compartmentalizing,” but nobody’s that good. A non-silly version of this story would have to show the slippage between the old and new self–how does a former callous exploiter of women and rapist-murderer respond when, say, his wife shows signs of independence or sexual boredom? When she’d rather meet her friend for coffee and save the sex for later? Hoffman solves that problem by having Jorie be the “perfect” wife–she wants whatever he wants, so their marriage has no conflict.
Blue Diary belongs to a contemporary minigenre: books, usually by women, in which a woman character must deal with the discovery that a man she loves has done something awful to a woman. Before and After, by Rosellen Brown, is another one: Here a mother is faced with a son who murders a girl. It’s the realistic version of the standard Gothic plot, in which a woman thinks she’s discovered that her wonderful man has killed or otherwise harmed a woman, but her fears are shown to be mistaken–really, the man was the victim (see Jane Eyre and Rebecca)–and love is restored. The science-fiction writer Joanna Russ wrote an essay some years ago about popular Gothic romances called “Someone’s Trying To Kill Me, and I Think It’s My Husband.” Her thesis was that these books are popular because they express, in disguised form, dependent women’s vulnerability to men and their fear of them. The standard Gothic assuages this fear by showing it to be a misapprehension. In Hoffman and Brown–not to mention a long line of popular movies from The Stepford Wives to What Lies Beneath–the fear is confirmed: The nice men and the killer-men are the same people.
If the heroines of these stories weren’t so dumb, they’d realize that in the first five pages.
Over to you, Erik,
With lilies and blackbirds, of course,
Katha
